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Different fittings of tyres have been growing at a staggering 10% per year in the past two decades.
Car buyers like the look of big wheels. And although tyres for standard wheels are more fuel efficient, the Dundee factory has been undercut both by changes in the market and cheaper imports.
There's a lot more change to come for the car industry as it goes electric and autonomous.
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Douglas FraserBusiness/economy editor, Scotland
If you've needed new tyres recently, you probably found that they had to be ordered and trucked from a distant warehouse.
It used to be that you could go into a garage, you might get a choice of three manufacturers, and there and then, the mechanics could haul any of the three off a storage rail.
What used to take 20 minutes now takes days, and often a lot more money.
The change is partly down to the business practice of limiting stock to reduce costs, and having car parts delivered to order.
But it has more to do with the growth in the range of tyres.
That seems to be the reason why Michelin has not only punctured hopes for continued employment at its Dundee manufacturing plant, but on Tuesday it is telling its 845 workers that it will have the whole operation up on bricks within two years.
It's not quite like the rapid demise of the horse-drawn carriage-builder early last century. The auto industry will remain huge. But it's in the early stages of very significant change, and the Dundee workforce has been very unfortunate to find that it's making the items that are going out of automotive fashion.
Car buyers increasingly want big wheels, on the basis that, well, they look cool. Big wheels require thinner tyres, if they are to fit the profile of the car.
Car buyers also like big chunky Sports Utility Vehicles, and they are designed with big chunky wheels and tyres.
And with so much more variation in the market, the growth in the range of tyres required is simply astonishing.
According to Fleet News, a trade website for those who buy their cars by the dozen, tyre choice has been rising at around 10% per year.
It says that "in 1997, 19 tyre sizes accounted for up to 90% of company car tyre fitments. Today 120 tyre sizes account for 90% of fitment, with the remaining 10% comprising a staggering 1030 sizes."
That's a lot to ask of the tyre manufacturers. On relatively small production runs, it helps explain why niche tyres can have some alarmingly niche prices.
'Profound transformation'
And what of the bog standard 16-inch wheel? Well, it's still there, on a bog standard car. But that's Dundee's problem. Car makers selling bog standard cars, in a price-sensitive segment of the market, choose to fit them with bog standard tyres, which can be manufactured more cheaply in Asia.
Dundee's role within the 17-country, 105,000-worker, French-based Michelin empire has been to produce not just 16-inch tyres, but premium ones.
And while demand for them has not disappeared, it has fallen away sharply. From the HQ in Clermont Ferrand, they say it is "a profound transformation", and one that has accelerated.
According to Dundee factory boss John Reid, the change is "dramatic and permanent" and the company "has to address these structural changes".
It could have done so by re-tooling the Dundee plant for the wider range of tyres demanded.
But having already spent 70 million euros on modernising the site in recent years, Michelin doesn't want to plough in more. "The plant is unsuitable, and conversion is not financially viable," it says.
Electric flux
In a recent warning to the French stock exchange about the state of the tyre market, Michelin's finance chief was quoted by the Financial Times as saying "there is a lot of nervousness in the market today. There have been multiple evolutions of guidance [by the carmakers] in particular."
In other words, the whole industry is in a state of flux. We know why it's in a state of not just flux but high anxiety in the UK. Manufacturing supply chains face a rupturing through Brexit.
New car sales are down 7% so far this year, and 10% in Scotland. That is after some years of strong figures, fuel injected by a revolution in the way cars are financed in Britain.
The industry more widely is having to make rapid adjustments as demand for diesel cars plummets and both hybrid electric and plug-in electric cars see rapid growth.
It's not simple to make that adjustment. Electric power requires a lot more space and weight for batteries. The spare tyre tends to be one casualty, meaning a shift towards a more expensive tyre designed to keep running while punctured, at least far enough to get to somewhere it can be replaced.
Yet that push towards lower emissions could also become a push back towards the beleaguered 16-inch wheel.
Bigger wheels not only provide a less cushioned, less comfortable ride: they also tend to use more fuel. And the wider the wheel hitting the road - "rolling resistance" in the jargon - the more noise. The decibel count could become more of an issue as internal combustion gives way to an electric whirr.
As for the autonomous car? When that rubber hits the road, it may be too much, for now at least, to expect it to change its own tyres.
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The Scottish Finance Secretary John Swinney has presented his plan for the budget .
This is the first budget in which the Scottish Finance Secretary has been able to decide tax rates. Mr Swinney announced the rates of two new devolved taxes, the Land and Buildings Transaction Tax, which will replace Stamp Duty, and the Scottish Landfill Tax.
He said homebuyers in Scotland would pay no tax on properties costing less than £135,000. Under the new Land and Building Transaction Tax, a tax of 2% will apply to transactions between £135,000 and £250,000, while a 10% rate will apply to those between £250,000 and £1m and 12% above £1m.
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Iain Gray, Scottish Labour finance spokesman
"Scottish Labour welcomes any attempts to introduce a more graduated replacement to stamp duty.
"This budget demonstrates once and for all that we have a powerful devolved parliament in Holyrood, just as the people of Scotland democratically, decisively and emphatically chose to remain within the UK just three short weeks ago.
"However, what we have seen is that Mr Swinney's successive budgets have failed to protect our NHS. The reality is that health spending in Scotland has not kept pace with spending in England and we know Scottish Government plans are being worked on for £450 million in cuts."
Willie Rennie, Scottish Liberal Democrat leader
"There is still a great deal to be done to ensure that this budget delivers for families, with new investment to ensure that childcare provision in Scotland matches what Liberal Democrats have secured in other parts of the country.
"We need to see action to restore college funding to 2011 levels, so more young people can get the best start in life, and on mental health so that these crucial services get the investment they need."
Gavin Brown, Conservative finance spokesperson
"This is another example of the SNP lurching to the left. It's not a mansion tax. A family buying a house worth £325,000 would be hit - homes of various types, and even some flats, will be subject to the rise. It's not just going to hit the wealthy, it's also a suburbs tax that will impact many ordinary middle class families.
"This isn't about people in their 50s and 60s who have already found their family home and settled. It's going the overwhelm people from their late 20s to early 40s, who are thinking about starting or adding to their family. They need to think about a suitable home to raise their children, they need to think about schooling.
"With this huge hike in tax, for thousands of those people that aspiration has become impossible because of the much heavier price tag. This move will also distort the market. There will be a rush of people looking to sell their homes before this incredible rate kicks in, and far fewer after April."
David Lonsdale, director, Scottish Retail Consortium
"Retailers contribute over a quarter of all revenues from business rates in Scotland. The decision to ensure the poundage rate rises no faster than that which applies in England and confirmation that the £95 million larger retailer levy will be scrapped next Spring are, therefore, both positive and welcome.
"Business rates are set to generate £2.8 billion in tax revenues next year, up from £2.1 billion just five years ago. A comprehensive longer term overhaul of the rates system is required, which would increase retailers' confidence about investing in property, create more jobs and help revive high streets."
Paul Brewer, head of government and public sector at PwC in Scotland
"We welcome the continued focus on infrastructure investment to underpin Scotland's future economic growth. The commitment of £125 million to the housing sector, which includes housing associations and low cost housing providers, will be welcomed and, alongside the £135,000 threshold before the new property tax regime kicks in, will undoubtedly benefit young people and those on low wages who are keen to get on the property ladder.
"It is to be hoped that, as the debate over further devolved powers reaches its conclusions, we'll see further targeted investment focused on making Scotland an attractive business location with the transport, digital and housing infrastructure that encourages the private sector to invest."
Graeme Brown, director of Shelter Scotland
"Ahead of this announcement we called on the Finance Secretary to invest an additional £200 million in a budget for homes in order to start tackling Scotland's housing crisis.
"While £125 million of additional funds is welcome, the commitment to deliver only 4,000 social rented homes is a missed opportunity and shows the Scottish Government's ambition falls well short of meeting the expectations of 150,500 people stuck on council house waiting lists. To bring real hope to these families and individuals, we need to deliver at least 10,000 social rented homes a year."
Grahame Smith, Scottish Trades Union Congress (STUC) general secretary
"Today's budget provides little relief for hard pressed public service workers who have seen their real terms income falling by thousands of pounds in recent years. STUC reiterates its support for the continuing Living Wage commitments within Public Sector pay policy but is very concerned about the squeeze on those on median pay of a little over £21,000 per year which is getting more and more painful every year.
"These real terms wage cuts are a disaster for our members and a disaster for the Scottish economy which desperately needs a boost in demand."
Peter Kelly, director of the Poverty Alliance
"Scotland is a vastly unequal country, with the three richest families owning the same wealth as the bottom twenty per cent. Across Glasgow alone, there is a life expectancy gap of eleven years between those in the most deprived areas and those in the most affluent communities. We welcome measures to tackle this inequality, and particularly increased funding to tackle child poverty and to mitigate against the impact of welfare reform."
Philip Hogg, chief executive, Homes for Scotland
"With all home purchases under £325,000 set to 'win' under the new system, the plans set out by Swinney have the potential to support an active housing market. However, we are yet to fully assess the impact that an increased tax take from higher value homes, and an increase in tax charged on land purchases, in meeting the Scottish government's desire to be revenue neutral, will have on home building businesses."
Mary Taylor, chief executive, Scottish Federation of Housing Associations
The additional boost referred to in the budget statement of £125m in financial support to the housing sector is welcome and we look forward to the detail of how this extra subsidy is to be allocated between new social rented homes, where the greatest need exists, and low-cost home ownership and market-rate initiatives. However, with more support to the sector, much more could be achieved towards achieving the government's housing completion targets."
Jim Hillan, tax partner, CMS law firm
The Scottish budget statement makes the point that non-residential Land and Buildings Transaction Tax will be cheaper than the old Stamp Duty Land Tax for transactions up to around £2m. However, transactions of major strategic importance for businesses regularly weigh-in at more than that, and, on a £50m acquisition, the tax bill goes up by almost £250,000. There may be an assumption that large transactions can support a larger tax bill - that may not always be the case."
Andrew Perratt, head of residential in Scotland for estate agents Savills
"Young families who need to live in the prime hubs of Edinburgh, Aberdeenshire and Glasgow's west end, where average house prices are considerably higher, the proposed increases are so punitive they may discourage many buyers from moving. In view of this we anticipate increased market activity between now and the spring, whereby buyers are likely to make quick and committed decisions before the new tax comes into force in April."
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President Obama seems determined to both talk and act tough after the attack in Libya. He told an audience in Las Vegas: "We want to send a message all around the world to anybody who will do us harm - no act of terror will dim the light of the values that we proudly shine on the rest of the world."
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Mark MardellNorth America editor@BBCMarkMardellon Twitter
He went on: "No act of violence will shake the resolve of the United States of America... we will keep going, we will keep going because the world needs us. We are the one indispensable power in the world."
He's spoken to the father and mother of Chris Stevens, the ambassador who was killed in the attack and told them justice would be done. In a TV interview he said: "we go after anybody who would attack Americans."
It would seem, after talk like that, that failure is not an option. He's backed up his version of American exceptionalism by moving two warships off the coast of Libya and sending 50 marines from an anti-terrorist squad to the country. The Pentagon won't comment on reports that drones are being flown across eastern Libya searching for possible militant camps.
'Playing politics'
It is clear his response to the first killing of an American ambassador for 30 years is an election issue. Mitt Romney seized on a statement from the Cairo embassy to argue that the president was keen to apologise for American values and was sending mixed messages. He repeated this argument forcefully at a news conference even before the president had made a statement in the Rose Garden.
If you want to know what the commentators think of Mr Romney's strategy you can choose between "noxious and indecent", "rash and shameful", "craven and ill-advised" or "unfair and hyperbolic".
Although the latter is from Senator McCain's former chief of staff, conservatives have a point when they say most of the condemnation comes from liberals in the "mainstream media".
There are those who defend Mr Romney, but in the last two years of following him I can't remember such unity of scorn from the media.
President Obama has joined in, accusing Mr Romney of shooting first and aiming later saying: "As president, one of the things I've learned is you can't do that, that it's important for you to make sure that the statements you make are backed up by the facts, and that you've thought through the ramifications before you make them."
This has yet to play out, but Mitt Romney stands accused of playing politics with a tragedy - a dangerous game when the president holds most of the cards.
UPDATE: My colleague Regan Morris was at the Las Vegas rally on Wednesday night and sent this report on the mood in the crowd:
President Obama started on a sombre note, by quelling cheers of "four more years" to mourn the loss of four Americans in Libya and send "heartfelt prayers to their loved ones".
But many said they were more concerned about jobs and the economy. Nevada, a swing state, has the highest unemployment rate in the nation at 12%.
Still Libya overshadowed the event: "I hope he doesn't start another war," Stanley Sabbath said. "He's got to figure out how they'll go about resolving it - without starting a war."
Andrew Davis, 20, brought his newborn daughter Gabrielle. "I'm more concerned with jobs. We have this little one we're trying to support now and it's not easy," Mr Davis said.
Many at the rally did not realise that the American consulate in Libya had been attacked. As the president spoke, people in the crowd murmured: "Libya? What happened in Libya?"
After the rally, an undecided voter said he was still sitting on the fence about who to vote for and feared neither Barack Obama nor Mitt Romney could respond to the situation in Libya without more conflict: "It's terrible - we might be in for another road of heartache here," he said.
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The army in Sri Lanka say an officer and another soldier have been killed in an attack on one of their bases by Tamil Tiger rebels.
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The army said the attack took place near the northern town of Vavuniya, close to rebel-held territory.
The army said their troops had returned fire.
The clash took place amid growing speculation that the European Union is about to ban the Tamil Tigers as a terrorist outfit.
The United States, where Tigers are proscribed, earlier this week urged the EU to ban Tamil Tigers following an upsurge in violence between the rebels and government forces in the recent weeks.
Meanwhile, a Tamil Tigers said one of their cadres was sot dead at his home on Thursday night at Mankerny in Batticaloa District.
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Plans to build a new sixth form centre at Pembrokeshire College have been approved by the county council.
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The college sought permission for a £6.6m two-storey extension at its Merlins Bridge campus in Haverfordwest.
College A-level students will go there, along with sixth formers from Ysgol Bro Gwaun and Ysgol Dewi Sant.
They would be followed Sir Thomas Picton and Tasker Milward sixth formers if the council's sixth form shake-up plans are approved.
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A man has been arrested and charged in connection with the seizure of suspected prescription drugs worth £50,000.
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Police in Ballymena say the 40-year-old was charged following a search in the Demesne area of the town on Tuesday.
The PSNI carried out the search after Border Force officers intercepted a package containing the tablets.
The man is expected to appear at Ballymena Magistrate's Court on 6 August.
Chief Inspector William Calderwood said he welcomed the removal of drugs from the community, adding "the criminal elements involved have no regard for the misery they cause."
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When the 79-year-old King Salman took over the Saudi throne in January, he promised security and stability. "We will adhere to the path this nation has followed since it was established," he said.
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But where will that path take the kingdom? Onwards towards further limited reform or a retreat into greater conservativism?
And with the high-profile case of Saudi blogger Raif Badawi - sentenced to 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashes for "insulting Islam" - once again drawing attention to the country's record on human rights, four expert witnesses offer their insight into what the future might hold.
'Modest reforms will continue': Journalist Khaled Almaeena
As editor-in-chief of the Arab News, Saudi Arabia's first English-language daily newspaper, Khaled Almaeena has interviewed three Saudi kings. He believes King Salman will follow his predecessor's path.
He says: "Over the years I met [him] dozens of times. He has knowledge, he has travelled and he's very well-read. He's a very astute person, austere, he's very focused and he's also very disciplined."
He is also the family disciplinarian. When Saudi princes and princesses got into trouble, Khaled Almaeena says, it was Prince Salman who would quietly sort things out.
"He was like the gatekeeper, he would solve the problems, do a few things and discuss, advise and guide them. He sees to it that nobody strays across boundaries that they should not," he says.
But it's as governor of Riyadh, a post he held for 50 years, where Prince Salman had the most impact, transforming a desert town into a sprawling city of seven million with skyscrapers and fast-food chains.
"Making Riyadh into a major city, building schools and colleges, pushing around development, also initiating social development by focusing on hospitals and other issues... shows a man who is deeply concerned about his people," Khaled Almaeena says.
And he says that as governor, King Salman was supportive of women in public life.
"Riyadh has now become the hub of so many meetings," he says.
"A few years ago, you would not find any female in these meetings or in these symposiums.
"One could see the changes where the participation of women was becoming more and more profound."
And Khaled Almaeena thinks it's unlikely that King Salman will reverse the late King Abdullah's modest reforms.
He says: "There were so many things that were taboo before in this country.
"Now, the newspapers and the media by and large focus on issues like corruption, child abuse, so many other things.
"Prince Salman is as I said astute and observes what's going on around, he is a very well-travelled man. So there will be no going back."
'Power will be consolidated': Ali Al-Ahmed, director of the Institute of Gulf Affairs
Ali Al-Ahmed is a Shia, born in Saudi Arabia's eastern province. His parents, siblings, nephew and uncle all spent long periods in jail, so he emigrated to the US. He now runs the Institute for Gulf Affairs in Washington, a think tank critical of the Saudi government.
"I think he will expand power to the ruling family and will concentrate it within his own allies within the ruling family," he says.
He points to the sweeping changes made by King Salman in his first 10 days.
In a smattering of royal decrees, ministers were sacked, others appointed and councils abolished. The king has concentrated power within the region of Najd, seen as the monarchy's natural constituency.
"So loyalty and trust is the name of the game here," Ali Al-Ahmed says.
"He would make sure to keep the family happy.
"That's why you will see more members of the family getting greater share of the pie, the political, economic pie, at the expense of the people."
Ali Al-Ahmad says history offers a stark warning if the family is not happy.
"Starting in 1932 onward, the Saudi ruling family had had a problem with infighting," he says.
"King Saud, the son of Abdulaziz, was overthrown and deposed by his half-brothers... King Salman was part of that operation.
"The Saudi ruling family is now larger than ever, and naturally there will be tension."
King Salman also abolished the 14 supreme councils that covered various different areas such as media, Islamic affairs, health and so on, with the responsibility and authority of these councils being rolled into just two, one run by his son and the other by his nephew Mohammad bin Nayef.
The controversial minister of the interior, Mohammad bin Nayef, is now second in line to the throne.
Ali Al-Ahmad says he has a "really dark record" on human rights.
"The fact that he has imprisoned even woman drivers, that has never happened in the country's history, and established a terrorism court... you will see that... the new king now is really concerned about security," he says.
Many also hold Mohammad bin Nayef responsible for the killing of protesters by security forces.
Ali Al-Ahmad argues his nephew's promotion suggests King Salman will take Saudi Arabia in a different direction to his predecessor:
"I think he will change it in some ways," he says.
"He also will become much more conservative in terms of social policies and will be harsher in terms of security and political policies."
'America's valuable ally': Bruce Riedel, director of intelligence, the Brookings Institution
Bruce Riedel is director of the intelligence project at the Brookings Institution, a foreign policy think tank in the US. He was at the CIA for 29 years, mostly on the Middle East desk, a job that took him all over the region and into the company of then Prince Salman.
"I've met Salman a half dozen or so times, often in larger meetings," he says.
"[He] always came across as a very serious person, a person who valued the relationship with the United States but also understood that there were limits on what a conservative kingdom like Saudi Arabia can do with America, which has very, very different values and very different lifestyle than the kingdom."
But Mr Riedel believes that relationship, forged 70 years ago on an American cruiser in the Suez Canal, is unlikely to change.
"King Salman has been at the core of Saudi decision making for more than a half century," he says.
"So I don't think he's about to do anything fundamentally different.
"I think we're going to see a lot of continuity here.
"President Obama's early trip to Riyadh right after the passing of King Abdullah set a good tone for the relationship."
But since King Salman came to power last month, allegations have surfaced that senior Saudi royals funded al-Qaeda throughout the late 90s.
The Saudi embassy has dismissed the claims, but they could nonetheless damage relations between the two countries.
"King Salman... was given responsibility for raising private Saudi funds to support the Afghan mujahideen against the Soviet Union," says Bruce Riedel.
"Of course the US and other countries were covertly providing support to the Afghan mujahideen.
"The private Saudi money kept the mujahideen going.
"And of course, in addition to private money, there were also volunteers who went to fight with the Afghan mujahideen, most famously Osama Bin Laden. [Then] Prince Salman was involved in all of those things."
So the key question for the US is when did that relationship between Saudi Arabia and Osama Bin Laden end?
Bruce Riedel says it began to deteriorate in the mid-1990s.
"Whether indirect contacts continued on for a few years is a subject of much speculation," he says.
"The 9/11 Commission came to the conclusion, though, that there was no Saudi role in the planning of the attacks of 11 September 2001.
"What's more important is that today the kingdom is one of the most valuable allies that we have in the intelligence war, the covert war, against al-Qaeda, and against the Islamic State."
But what could be much more problematic is the issue of human rights, as highlighted by Raif Badawi's case.
"For most of the US-Saudi relationship," argues Bruce Riedel, "just like for most of the UK-Saudi relationship, human rights issues were really not on the plate. I think they're more on the plate now than they've ever been before.
"In the halls of government, both in London and in Washington, I think they're still regarded as too problematic to raise in heads of states meetings. But they will be raised in lower level meetings; they already are. And they're bound over time to become a question of friction in the relationship."
And once again, the controversial minister of the interior is centre stage.
"Muhammad bin Nayef... has done more to fight al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula than anyone else," Mr Riedel says.
"But he also has very hard-line views about any kind of dissent."
So King Salman's decision to promote him could put Saudi Arabia on a collision course with its major ally.
"Inevitably, as the Middle East and the Arab world is trying to find ways to have reform and better governance, we're going to have a problem between the West and the most conservative, even reactionary, counter-revolutionary state in the region, which is Saudi Arabia," Mr Riedel says.
'No middle ground for peaceful protest': Saudi film-maker Safa Al-Ahmad
Last year the Saudi film-maker Safa Al-Ahmad made a documentary about a largely unknown uprising in the eastern province of Saudi Arabia. The government had tried to suppress the protests since they began in 2011, while the world's attention was focused on activists in Egypt, Libya and Yemen.
She says: "It was really heart-breaking to see other countries getting full coverage of what's happening, yet this huge thing is happening [here].
"It's historic: this has never happened where protests in Saudi Arabia last for three years.
"The last time there were protests in the eastern province was in 1979, and it lasted maybe a week."
The protesters demanded the release of political prisoners and more economic and political rights for the Shia minority.
"[The protests] were massive initially and people weren't covering their faces," Safa Al-Ahmad says.
"Everybody felt that there was a moment in 2011 of hope, like genuine hope, that peaceful protests would bring change.
"I think this was an inspiring moment."
But these hopes came to nothing.
"They realised this was not going to be the response of the Saudi government," Safa Al-Ahmad says.
"I ended [my film] in the cemetery, where they had a special plot for what they called the martyrs of the movement.
"The government has quite successfully silenced most of the protests."
About 20 protesters were killed while hundreds were injured or jailed.
Safa Al-Ahmad has herself been warned not to return. She is left fearful for her country's future:
"I think the crux of what 2011 in the whole Arab world and specifically in Saudi Arabia revealed [was] the huge schism between our governments and the people, and the inability of the two to communicate in a way that's conducive of genuine deep reform in the country," she says.
"The government has left very little space for peaceful protest and reform.
"That is the real danger of continuing to clamp down on activists and putting them in jail - you are leaving no middle ground for people to reform.
"And so the more estranged the young feel, both Sunni and Shia in Saudi Arabia, across the board, you are pushing them towards something that is truly frightening."
The Inquiry is broadcast on the BBC World Service, Tuesdays from 13:05 GMT. Listen online or download the podcast.
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Class sizes could increase in Moray in a bid to tackle a teacher shortage and concerns surrounding school capacities.
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Councillors will this week be asked to change the limit for P2 and P3 classes to 30 from the current 25 pupils.
Moray Council recently warned that more children could have to be sent home from schools across the region unless it addressed a teacher recruitment crisis.
Earlier this year there were 70 vacancies across Moray.
A Scottish government spokesperson said: "The Scottish government believes that smaller class sizes, especially in the early years and in areas of deprivation, help improve the quality of the pupil teacher interaction, which in turn leads to improved learning."
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In May, New York City's landmarks preservation agency blocked renovation changes to the Four Seasons restaurant in the modernist Seagram building. More than half-a-century ago, it was another architectural upheaval that led to the creation of a powerful city landmarks law.
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By Nick BryantBBC News, New York
To descend into Penn Station in midtown New York is to visit an architectural crime scene.
A cramped, subterranean space, interred under Madison Square Garden, it has the look and lifeless feel of an over-sized subway station.
Not even two storeys tall, the concourse has a low-hung roof, held up by stumpy, inelegant columns and dotted with air conditioning ducts, fluorescent lights and security cameras enclosed in smoke-glass half-domes.
Battleship grey, which presumably had a futuristic sheen when the station was constructed in 1969, is the dominant colour. It gives an already bland building even more of a deadening air.
In what should be one of the world's great rail terminuses, the locomotives themselves are hidden further underground. To board them means descending deeper into this miserable warren.
Outside of the US penitentiary system, it is hard to think of a more joyless building.
What makes the "new" Penn Station all the more depressing is the black and white pictures on its walls of the old Penn Station, demolished in 1963.
Wrecking balls were hurled at one of Manhattan's most noble buildings, a station which could boast a facade grander in scale that the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin and a concourse vaster than the nave of St Peter's in Rome.
Completed in 1910, and designed by the architectural firm McKim, Mead and White, it was inspired by the Baths of Caracalla from Roman antiquity, and shaped from the same stone as the Coliseum. Alas, a terminus designed to celebrate travel gave way to a transportation hub devised to process passengers.
Efficiency was the watchword. And remarkably, the building was destroyed with hardly any public outcry, save for the sorrowful cries of a small group of local architects.
In the ruins of the old Penn Station, however, are found the origins of the New York landmarks law.
Passed in 1965, the measure was intended to conserve the city's architectural heritage, a surprisingly radical idea in a decade with little respect for the past. This spring, the law has celebrated its golden jubilee.
Without the landmark law, some of New York's most-loved buildings would have disappeared from the urban landscape.
Much of SoHo's beautiful cast-iron district would have gone. Likewise, Tribeca and the Meatpacking district. In other words, the developers would have laid waste to what have recently become Manhattan's most desirable neighbourhoods.
Row upon row of Brooklyn's brownstones would also have been obliterated, so, too, Radio City Music Hall, the home of the famed Rockettes.
Still more felonious would have been the destruction of Grand Central Station, arguably the city's most breathtaking public space.
In 1968, Penn Central Railroad, the company that bulldozed Penn Station, announced plans for the redevelopment of Grand Central that could have led to the destruction of its facade and main waiting room.
Fortunately, the newly created New York Landmarks Preservation Commission, with the celebrity backing of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, stepped in. The railroad challenged the constitutionality of the landmark law in a test case that went all the way to the US Supreme Court in Washington, and the justices sided with the preservationists.
Fifty years on, the law protects 1,400 landmarks, 115 historic interiors, 109 historic districts and 10 scenic landmarks, including Central Park. Almost 30% of Manhattan's buildings are safeguarded.
They not only include heritage sites, like the RCA building lobby at the Rockefeller Center, but also modern architectural masterpieces, like Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum and the Lever Building on Park Avenue, one of New York's early curtain wall office towers.
The Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, the birthplace of the modern gay rights movement, will soon be considered by the commission for landmark status.
More recently, the city's landmarks preservation commission used the law to reject changes to the Four Seasons restaurant inside the modernist Seagram building in Manhattan.
Not every noteworthy building was saved. The original Ziegfeld Theatre, one of Manhattan's great art deco temples, was demolished in 1966 to make way for a nondescript 50-storey skyscraper.
The Singer Building in Lower Manhattan, briefly the world's tallest structure at the start of the last century, was also hauled down.
A stunning skyscraper, designed in the Beaux-Arts style, it would have been a great adornment to the modern skyline.
Nowadays the main aesthetic threat to New York comes not from what is being torn down, but rather what is being built.
Its heritage buildings will remain just that, a legacy to the landmark law and the visionary preservationists who stood in the way of a mindless rush towards modernity.
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US pre-eminence in the Pacific is no more.
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By Jonathan MarcusDefence and diplomatic correspondent
For a long time experts have been speaking about China's rapid military modernisation referring to it as "a rising power".
But this analysis may be out of date. China is not so much a rising power; it has risen; and in many ways it now challenges the US across a number of military domains.
This is the conclusion of a new report from the US Studies Centre at the University of Sydney in Australia.
It warns that US defence strategy in the Indo-Pacific region "is in the throes of an unprecedented crisis" and that Washington might struggle to defend its allies against China.
"America no longer enjoys military primacy in the Indo-Pacific", it notes, "and its capacity to uphold a favourable balance of power is increasingly uncertain."
The report points to Beijing's extraordinary arsenal of missiles that threaten the key bases of the US and its allies. These installations, it asserts, "could be rendered useless by precision strikes in the opening hours of a conflict".
China is not a global superpower like the United States. Indeed it is doubtful if its military ambitions extend that far (though this too may be changing as it slowly develops a network of ports and bases abroad).
For now its global reach depends much more on the power of its economy. China lacks the "proselytising zeal" - the sense of over-seas mission, that over the twentieth century saw the US strive for global dominance.
It also has nothing like the soft-power pull of the United States - no equivalent to blue jeans, Hollywood or burgers - to encourage people to share its values.
Indeed according to many indices Washington's raw military punch still greatly out-weighs that of Beijing. Washington's nuclear arsenal (and indeed Moscow's) is significantly larger than that available to Beijing.
The US still retains a technological edge in key areas like intelligence collection; ballistic missile defence; and the latest generation warplanes. The US can also rely upon a deeply entrenched network of alliances both in Asia and through Nato in Europe.
China has nothing like this kind of alliance system. But it is fast eroding Washington's technical edge. And in any case what matters to China is Asia and what it sees in expansive terms as its own back-yard. Two key factors - focus and proximity - mean that in Asia, China is already a superpower to rival the US.
China has studied US capabilities and warfighting and has come up with an effective strategy to mitigate the traditional sources of US military power, not least the US Navy's powerful carrier battle groups, the central element of Washington's ability to project military force.
Dubbed in military-speak, an "anti-access and area denial" approach, China has single-mindedly focused on a range of sensors and weapons systems that it hopes will compel US forces to operate as far away from its own shores as possible.
At the outset this was inherently a defensive posture. But increasingly analysts see China's capabilities as enabling it to seize the initiative, confident that it can deter and cope with any likely US response.
"Chinese counter-intervention systems," the Australian study notes, "have undermined America's ability to project power into the Indo-pacific, raising the risk that China could use limited force to achieve a fait accompli victory before America can respond, challenging US security guarantees in the process."
China's goal is in a time of crisis is to deny the US access to the area within the "first island chain" (the South China Sea bounded by a line running from the bottom of Japan, encompassing Taiwan, and passing to the west of the Philippines).
But it also seeks to restrict access to the outer "second island chain" with weapons that can reach as far as the US bases on Guam. This overall strategy can be bolstered by Chinese land-based aircraft and missiles.
Of course, it is not as if the Pentagon is unaware of the China challenge. After decades of counter-insurgency warfare the US military is being re-structured and re-equipped for renewed big-power competition. In the Cold War the focus was the Soviet Union. Today it is largely China.
However the Sydney University report questions whether Washington is sufficiently focused on the task in hand. It says that "an outdated superpower mindset in the (US) foreign policy establishment is likely to limit Washington's ability to scale back other global commitments or to make the strategic trade-offs required to succeed in the Indo-Pacific."
Money is going into new weaponry and research. But the task is huge.
"America has an atrophying force that is not sufficiently ready, equipped or postured for great power competition" and the report warns that a back-log of simultaneous modernisation priorities "will likely outstrip its budget capacity."
It is a sobering document written by a prestigious institution from one of Washington's closest allies in the region.
China clearly feels empowered - you can see this from the tone of its recently published defence white paper.
President Xi Jinping has decided not just to stand up to President Trump in the ongoing trade war but to take a much more assertive position, whether it be towards the pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong or to China's long-standing claims over Taiwan.
China's military rise to match its growing economic muscle was inevitable. But some analysts fear that President Trump has made a difficult situation worse.
Many in the US feel it was time to stand-up to China on trade - but the way the US is going about it leads several experts to fear that Washington may simply lose the trade war.
Overall the Trump Administration's foreign policy often lacks a clear strategic aspect and is prone to the whims of the Presidential twitter feed and bizarre distractions like his apparent desire to purchase Greenland.
In contrast China knows exactly where it wants to go and it has the strategy and the means to get there. Indeed, for all intents and purposes, it may have already arrived.
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A large number of Scottish independence supporters have gathered for a march through Dundee.
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The Tayside event was the latest called by the All Under One Banner (AUOB) organisation.
SNP MP Stewart Hosie, who represents Dundee East, was one of those on the march. He estimated that 16,000 people took part.
AUOB has said it will organise regular marches "until Scotland is Free". Its next event is planned for Edinburgh.
Previous AUOB events this year have taken place in Dumfries, Bannockburn and Inverness.
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When large parts of the economy were suddenly mothballed in March, the government stepped in with a scheme to pay 80% of the wages of people who could no longer go to work. At its peak nearly a third of the UK workforce were on furlough.
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By Lucy HookerBusiness reporter
While for a lucky few it felt like an unexpected holiday, others were in limbo, robbed of a sense of purpose and belonging. Some had a job to go back to. Some didn't.
'I felt rudderless'
When Flora Blaythwayt's employer, a supplier of condiments to restaurants and hotels, told her she was being furloughed, she had to go away and look up what the word meant.
"I thought, is this it, is this the chop?" she says.
Being paid most of her salary certainly made things easier. But she had just come out of a relationship and was living on her own in London.
"I felt horrible, in limbo, lost and alone. I felt rudderless," she says.
She needed something to focus on, so she went beach cleaning along the banks of the Thames, picking up scraps of plastic and other litter. Then she went home and turned the bits of old toys, sweet wrappers and bottle tops into greetings cards.
"I was distracting myself, doodling around, getting the creative juices flowing."
She gave the cards to friends and sold some on the e-commerce site Etsy. Then bigger retailers started to show an interest. What started as a wholesome activity to get her through lockdown, was starting to look like an opportunity to start her own sustainable business.
Washed Up Cards is far from providing financial security yet, but Flora thinks her furlough, which comes to an end on Saturday, may not turn out to be the disaster she initially feared - even though she doesn't have a job to return to.
"When I got told I was being made redundant I felt really wounded, gutted.
"But as the weeks have gone on I've started to think I'll look back and be grateful for being catapulted in this new direction."
'It was a bit like a second honeymoon'
"My furlough was fantastic. I loved it," says Louise Solomon, who works as a chef in Brighton.
"It was a godsend, to have a few months at home, not having to get up, not having to be anywhere."
Louise has spent the last 30 years working long shifts in professional kitchens, on her feet, with few breaks.
Her wife, a key worker, wasn't furloughed, but with Louise at home they found they had time to garden, sort cupboards, walk the dogs together, just "relax and have fun".
"We were able to reconnect and get to know each other again. It was a bit like a second honeymoon."
After three months she went back to work which wasn't easy.
"I suddenly felt older," says Louise. "I'm 50 next year. I've always been able to keep up, but I felt my pace had slowed. My body hurt for the first time."
Above all, though, she appreciates how lucky she was to have a job to go back to, given the precarious state of hospitality right now. "I appreciate for others it wasn't like that and my heart goes out to them."
'I missed my colleagues'
While it was nice to spend time with the family, Julie Simmons found being sent home from her job as a hotel receptionist robbed her of her sense of purpose.
"I think it did affect how I felt about myself," she says. "It's nice to feel you've brightened someone's day. To not have that interaction was odd."
Julie lives near Crawley in West Sussex, an area which, thanks to its reliance on Gatwick, boasted the highest rate of furlough in the country. But it wasn't just airline employees. Closing down air travel had a ripple effect on everything from local shops to taxi firms and hotels.
"It was very strange going from being there five or six days a week to nothing at all and not seeing anybody. Because we're a small hotel, we're a close team, we're all good friends. I did miss that," she says.
Plus there was the worry and uncertainty over whether she would have a job to come back to at all - although in the end Julie returned to work in September, albeit to a smaller team.
Julie says friends who worked through those months, teaching key workers' children in schools for example, at least felt they were making a difference. "It's been hard to think there are people out there risking their lives and you're sitting at home reading a book," she says.
'Furlough gave me time to prepare'
In March 33-year-old James Pemblington was working in his dream job, creating audio-visual effects at Alton Towers.
Right now he should have been supervising blood-curdling screams, the smoke machines and even the stink of fake vomit for the theme park's Halloween event.
But after five months on furlough he was made redundant.
"It's quite heartbreaking," he says.
However, James worked out early his role might be under threat and when the blow came he was firing on all cylinders.
First he asked a friend who does David Brent (of the Office) impersonations to make him a funny video reference. Then he had "Hire JP" T-shirts printed and distributed an edible CV - a chocolate brownie with a QR code printed on top.
He even had his details printed on the back of a lorry.
None of this landed him a job in his field, but he is about to start a short-term contract managing a new Covid testing site.
"I'm grateful for furlough because if I'd have lost my job at the start it would have been more of a shock," he says. "The furlough period gave me time to prepare myself to hit the job market."
He adds that if he had stayed on furlough for longer, it might have been self defeating "because in a couple of weeks there's going to be another few thousand people applying for the same roles".
The new job starts on Monday. In the meantime he's putting his creative skills to good use: preparing a full-blown audio-visual extravaganza for Halloween in his front garden, complete with ghosts, eerie green lights, spooky voices and billows of smoke.
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Preparations are under way across England and Wales as weather forecasters predict one of the most powerful storms of recent years will hit. With heavy rain and winds of up to 80 mph (130 kph) expected - and rush-hour trains already cancelled - what is the advice for households, motorists and commuters?
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Households
Insurance companies are advising householders to take basic precautions such as moving rubbish bins, garden furniture and hanging baskets to ensure they do not cause damage to cars or property if blown over.
"Damage to garage and shed doors are common claims," says Claire Foster of insurer Direct Line.
"Keep these closed and locked. This will not only prevent the wind blowing them off the hinges, it is good practice to keep your property secure."
Householders are advised to make sure drains and gutters are clear of debris so rainfall can flow effectively and does not lead to flooding.
But Ms Foster adds: "If the wind does pick up, its important householders don't put their safety at risk. If the wind is too strong to get on a ladder and clear the guttering or fix a lose tile then it shouldn't be attempted."
In the event of serious damage, people are being urged to establish an evacuation plan for their families and make a list of useful phone numbers including the local council, emergency services and insurers.
The British Red Cross, which has teams ready to assist people, says households should be prepared for possible blackouts and make sure mobile phones are charged.
Simon Lewis, head of the organisation's emergency response, adds: "Make sure you have torches at hand, as well as a battery-powered or wind-up radio to keep up-to-date with weather warnings and information for your area."
Councils, meanwhile, say crews are being readied to deal with downed trees, traffic disruption and property damage and are preparing to provide emergency accommodation.
Some councils are distributing sandbags, which people can use to protect homes, shops and businesses against possible flooding.
Councils will be posting regular updates on their websites and social media so people can stay up-to-date on the situation in their area.
Public transport
South West Trains is telling passengers not to travel on Monday with most services not running until at least 08:00 GMT to allow maintenance teams to check the lines.
First Capital Connect is also advising people "not to travel". It says it is unlikely to run any trains until after 09:00 GMT on Monday, to ensure nothing is blocking the railway. After that, there will be "far fewer services and with extended journey times".
C2c is also advising people "not to attempt to travel" with services suspended until at least 09:00 GMT, and then "disruption, short notice alteration and running at reduced speed".
Greater Anglia trains has similarly suspended all services on Monday until 09:00 GMT. It says after that it will look to run a reduced service on all lines but it expects there to be significant disruption throughout the day.
Southeastern is also "unlikely" to start services before 09:00 GMT; while East Coast, First Great Western, and Southern also say they will or are likely to run amended timetables. Passengers are advised to allow extra journey time.
London Overground says there will be no service before 09:00 GMT on Monday.
Passengers are advised to check before travelling and log onto National Rail Enquiries to sign up for free Twitter alerts.
People travelling abroad are also urged to make sure plane services will be running and be prepared for possible delays and cancellations.
Motorists
The Highways Agency says drivers should check weather forecast and road conditions, leave extra time if travel conditions are poor and be prepared to delay journeys if the weather becomes severe.
It says low speed limits or temporary closures may be imposed on exposed bridges and road closures due to falling debris. Accidents may also be more frequent.
Major road closures will be listed on the Highways Agency and Traffic Wales websites.
Motoring breakdown organisations the AA and RAC say they are boosting their emergency patrols but advise drivers should avoid unnecessary journeys.
The AA's Darron Burness says: "Although the predicted storm may pass through fairly quickly, the impact could last much longer, depending on the damage caused.
"Driving conditions are likely to be pretty hazardous with a risk of serious disruption, so heed any local police advice about whether it's safe to travel."
The AA is advising drivers to park their vehicles in a garage if possible. It suggests ensuring that items that could get blown over and cause damage are moved away from cars left parked outside.
Coasts and rivers
The Coastguard and Environment Agency are urging people to take extra care.
"In some parts of the country, waves are expected to be as high as eight or nine metres," a Coastguard spokeswoman says.
"Combined with winds, conditions on the sea and along the coast, particularly on cliffs top, are likely to be extremely treacherous. Sending units to help people in these types of avoidable incidents will also put rescue teams at risk.
"HM Coastguard's advice is simple: Don't take risks. But if you do get into difficulty, or spot someone who might be in trouble, call 999 and ask for the Coastguard."
Colin Williams, the Royal National Lifeboat Institution's regional operations manager, said: "The forecasters have given us plenty of warning so hopefully people will be doing the sensible thing and staying away from the sea.
"I know many boat owners are busy making their vessels secure and ensuring they are in a safe harbour."
The Environment Agency is closely monitoring water levels and has issued some flood warnings and dozens of flood alerts.
It says: "Seafronts, quaysides and jetties should be avoided due to the risk of overtopping by waves and wind-blown shingle."
In some places, such as Portsmouth, seafront exclusion zones in place, with people warned to stay away.
There is more information about the forecasts for Sunday and Monday on the BBC Weather, Met Office and Environment Agency websites. See BBC Travel News for up to date travel information and the Highways Agency and Traffic Wales websites for details about road conditions. BBC Local has information from your area.
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The top five acts on the BBC Sound of 2013 new music list will be revealed next week. The first list was BBC Sound of 2003, when 10 new artists were tipped for the top.
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By Ian YoungsEntertainment reporter, BBC News
We reveal who is still going strong, who has appeared on Dancing With the Stars and who is now a part-time squash coach.
Their ups and downs hold lessons for this year's crop, as well as illustrating the seismic changes that have taken place in the music industry over the past decade.
BBC Sound of 2013: Full coverage
1. 50 Cent
50 Cent's debut album was called Get Rich Or Die Tryin'.
He got rich.
A mythologised rise from teenage crack hustler on the mean streets of New York to Eminem's protege, via a couple of assassination attempts, gave the rapper both gangsta credibility and commercial appeal.
His debut album was the fastest-selling release in the US since records began 12 years earlier.
But by his third album in 2007, he faced a backlash from hip-hop purists who felt he had lost his street cred.
His fifth studio album, Street King Immortal, has been mired in delays and disputes with record label Interscope, but is now scheduled for release in February, preceded by the single My Life, featuring Eminem and Maroon 5's Adam Levine.
50 Cent also recently became a boxing promoter, with Cuban former Olympic flyweight champion Yuriorkis Gamboa on his books.
2. Electric Six
Good time Detroit rock 'n' rollers Electric Six made a splash with their high-octane hits Gay Bar and Danger High Voltage in 2003.
The first album came out on record label XL and the follow-up was on Warner Brothers. After that, they learned to become "self sufficient", singer Dick Valentine says.
"We got good at being dropped from labels and how to respond to that and taking matters into our own hands."
There have been many personnel changes - Valentine is the only remaining member of the original line-up - but he has now presided over eight studio albums.
"We've been sued by a couple of ex-band members and people we've worked with," he says. "We've had moments that could certainly be considered downs. But the ups certainly outweigh them."
Their reputation as an exciting live band has helped them keep a loyal following. "We do a pretty good job of keeping costs down on the road," Valentine says. "We don't carry too many roadies. We're not afraid to be seen loading our own gear.
"If somebody comes up to us and says 'You're rock stars, why are you loading your own gear?' they usually get punched in the mouth. We do everything we can to keep it going and make it profitable."
3. Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Riding the garage rock revival led by The Strokes and The White Stripes, this New York trio, led by the distinctive Karen O, became cult favourites.
Their debut album Fever To Tell earned a Grammy nomination and was named the best album of 2003 by the New York Times.
The second and third albums both reached the UK top 10 and a fourth will arrive in the spring.
Between band duties, Karen O wrote and performed the soundtrack for the film Where the Wild Things Are and guitarist Nick Zinner has published and exhibited his photographs.
4. The Thrills
Irish indie quintet The Thrills became known for carefree, sun-drenched tunes like Big Sur and Santa Cruz (You're Not That Far).
But they were dropped by EMI after their third album in 2007.
"The Thrills have never split up but there came a point where we just did not want to do anything any more," says guitarist Daniel Ryan.
"EMI had been taken over by [private equity firm] Terra Firma before our third album came out and it was like going from a Premiership soccer team to a fourth division side. The whole record company shrank."
Ryan is now managing the Dublin band Little Green Cars - who are on the BBC Sound of 2013 longlist. Thrills singer Conor Deasy is making a solo album with Paul Butler, who produced the debut by the Sound of 2012 winner Michael Kiwanuka.
Drummer Ben Carrigan released a solo album in 2011 and composes music for films and games, while bassist Padraic McMahon works as an account manager for the professional social network Linkedin.
Ryan adds: "I think back when The Thrills was happening and I was just caught up in how exciting the whole thing was. But for me now as a manager, I don't get excited because I don't want to be looking at another band on their third album that are completely irrelevant.
"That's the worst thing about The Thrills - I feel we made a good third album and we would have had another good album in us. But there comes a point in the music business when your credit just runs out and your stock just isn't worth anything any more.
"The most important thing was knowing when that time had come. And I definitely knew that."
5. Dizzee Rascal
When Dizzee Rascal performed at the London 2012 Olympic opening ceremony, he was revisiting old haunts - the stadium was built on the site where he performed on pirate radio at the start of his career.
Dizzee has taken east London grime to the big time and paved the way for a chart take-over by home-grown urban artists.
His first album Boy In Da Corner won the Mercury Prize in 2003, but it took another five years for a real commercial breakthrough.
Despite a fall-out with his label XL, he scored five number one singles between 2008 and 2010, including Dance Wiv Me and Bonkers. The first single from his fifth album will be unveiled on 1 January.
6. Interpol
The majestic melancholy of Interpol's debut album Turn on the Bright Lights earned it a place in NME magazine's top 10 albums of the 2000s.
Their commercial success grew steadily, with follow-up Antics reaching number 21 in 2004 and Our Love To Admire hitting number two in 2007. Their self-titled and most recent album made the top 10 in 2010.
Guitarist Daniel Kessler puts their sustained appeal down to the five years they spent learning their craft before their debut album came out as well as old-fashioned leg-work since.
"Our first record was released in the twilight of the old guard of the music industry and the dawning of the new one," he says. "We put out a record and toured it and built a word-of-mouth fanbase. That helped us.
"When bands come out today, they get swept up a lot quicker because you can discover bands in two seconds on the internet. When we came out, we didn't have that."
Singer Paul Banks released a solo album this year and a 10th anniversary edition of Turn on the Bright Lights has just come out. The group have started writing material for a fifth Interpol album.
7. Audio Bullys
The "dirty house" duo, with bulging beats and geezer vocals, provided the soundtrack to many a debauched night out.
Their biggest smash was a reworking of Nancy Sinatra's Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down), which reached number three in 2005.
But one half of the duo, Tom Dinsdale, left this February and said he would perform under his own name.
The remaining Audio Bully Simon Franks has been working on new material and says he is still making "a good living" from playing live in places like Russia, Holland and Argentina.
"But I think it's time, if I'm going to keep it going, to put out some new music," he says.
"I'm at a crossroads - I've got all this music and I'm not doing it with Tom at the moment, so how do I do it? Do I keep the brand going or do I start something new? That's the question I keep asking myself."
8. Mario
R&B singer Mario Barrett was 15 when his debut album reached the US top 10 in 2002.
He hit his peak two years later with his second album Turning Point, which earned two Grammy nominations and included the hit Let Me Love You.
But he never quite joined pop's A-list. After two more albums, he appeared on Dancing With The Stars in 2008.
He also made an MTV documentary titled I Won't Love You to Death, in which he helped his mother get treatment for heroin addiction. He is now working on a new album.
9. The Datsuns
Raucous New Zealand rockers The Datsuns blazed onto the scene and were named best live band at the NME Awards in 2003.
"We had that first wave of success in the dying gasp of the music industry, before downloading changed everything," says guitarist Christian Livingstone.
The desire to play music, rather than achieve fame and fortune, has kept the band going, he says.
"When you get in that situation we got [into], there is the inevitable backlash which did occur and was very harsh and unpleasant. But we kept on going because the fame and all that stuff was not the reason for doing it.
"So when that [fame] reduced in scale, we soldiered on and here we are, 10 years later and five albums in, still doing it."
But The Datsuns no longer make enough money to live off their music alone. So Livingstone has a sideline building guitar pedals, singer Dolf DeBorst runs a recording studio in Sweden, guitarist Phil Somervell is a squash coach and drummer Ben Cole is a session musician and drum teacher.
"Everybody's got something on the side to keep the ball rolling," Livingstone says.
The guitarist recalls the effects of turmoil in the music industry. Staff levels at their record label V2 were continually shrinking until the label itself vanished.
"Now you have to do things in a different way if you want to keep going," he says. "We put out our latest record ourselves because that's just the best way for somebody like us to do it."
His advice to bands on the Sound of 2013 list? "Make hay while the sun shines," he replies. "The ability to monetise music is a limited and narrow thing these days. So if you have the opportunity to do it, do it while you can."
10. Sean Paul
The Jamaican star has remained one of the biggest names in reggae and dancehall for the past decade.
He broke into the mainstream with his Grammy-winning second album Dutty Rock in 2002.
All three subsequent albums have been nominated for the Grammy Award for best reggae album.
He has scored 13 UK top 20 singles, including several collaborations with the likes of Beyonce, Jay Sean and Sasha.
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First of all, you need to ask for an appointment well in advance. Security agents call your head office to make sure you are who you say you are.
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By James ReynoldsBBC News, Baku
If your credentials check out, an appointment is made, and a guard escorts you to the top floor of the building. Another guard calls you in, tests your equipment and ask you to leave behind your mobile phone. You are taken through further checks and invited to sit in a corridor and admire works of art on the wall as you wait.
Then, just a few minutes behind schedule, one of the most fortified men in the Caucasus region arrives for his interview.
Michael Lotem is Israel's Ambassador to Azerbaijan. His embassy is the closest that Israel physically gets to its principal enemy, Iran. From the embassy it is only a four-hour drive south to the Iranian border.
The Israeli embassy in Baku is an important, and occasionally a dangerous, outpost. In January 2012, Azerbaijan's government said it broke up an Iranian plot to kill the ambassador.
"I can tell you that the Iranians don't sit still for a second," says Mr Lotem slowly, as he fiddles with his shirt sleeve. "But I'm not worried about my security. I have full confidence in the Azeri security services."
'More Tel Aviv than Tehran'
Israel and Azerbaijan have had diplomatic relations since April 1992, six months after the republic declared its independence from the Soviet Union.
Israel and the secular government of Azerbaijan share the same goal: to check the spread of political Islam in general and Iran in particular.
Theirs is an alliance reinforced by hardware. In February 2012, Israel sold Azerbaijan $1.6bn (1.3bn euros) of sophisticated weapons systems.
"We share the same view of the world, I guess," says Michael Lotem. "We share quite a few common problems. For us Israelis to find a Muslim country which is so open, so friendly, so progressive, is not something the Israelis take for granted."
Earlier this year, America's Foreign Policy magazine suggested the alliance between Israel and Azerbaijan went deeper than many had previously thought.
The magazine reported that Israel had secured an agreement to use Azerbaijan's airfields in case it went ahead with a military strike against Iran's nuclear facilities.
If true, this would give Israel a significant tactical advantage. But Israel denies the claim.
"That's sheer science fiction", says the ambassador, "or maybe we should drop the science out of it. The aim is having very solid relations with Azerbaijan."
Azerbaijan's population is mostly Shia Muslim. But its government is intensely secular.
A lone shop in the centre of Baku, called simply The Muslim Shop, shows how rare the public expression of Islam is in the capital.
In the evenings, restaurants serve Turkish-made beer to customers in Fountains Square. Most women do not wear headscarves. The centre of town has a McDonalds, a Mothercare and a Versace shop. Baku feels more like Tel Aviv than Tehran. The government is determined to stop its Islamic neighbour from encroaching.
"Azerbaijan naturally rejects the Iranian Islamic influence because it is perceived as a threat to the very nation state," says Leila Alieva, the Director of the independent Centre for National and International Studies in Baku.
"On the other hand, Azerbaijan has always enjoyed a very good relationship with the Jewish community."
Strike 'disastrous'
But there are those in Azerbaijan who disagree with their government's embrace of Israel.
Ilgar Ibrahimoglu is an Islamic cleric who campaigns for a greater role for Islam in Azerbaijan.
He works from a small office and prayer room in Baku. Guests are invited to take off their shoes when they enter in order to respect Islamic custom.
Mr Ibrahimglu enters the room, sits behind a desk and warns that previous journalists have made him look stupid. So he says that he will speak in short sentences, perhaps conscious that Azerbaijan's government will keep a close eye on his words.
"Iran is a Muslim country and a close neighbour of Azerbaijan", he says, "but I won't say more. Even if this was a live interview I'd say the same thing for five hours straight."
But when the staccato conversation turns to Israel, the cleric decides to loosen his rules and speak slightly more expansively.
"Azerbaijan shouldn't be friendly with a country that carries out state terror against another people, the Palestinians. Israel can't beat Iran. It couldn't win in Gaza or Lebanon, and it won't win in Iran."
The cleric's words won't make Azerbaijan switch alliances. In May 2012, two Azerbaijani poets were detained in Iran on charges of espionage. Azerbaijan's government has since advised its citizens not to travel to the Islamic Republic.
Elman Abdullayev, a Foreign Ministry spokesman, deals with Iran every day. He studied in California, and bounces from foot-to-foot as he talks.
He apologises for the renovations being made to the Ministry's Soviet era building (the apology is prompted when we pass a man who accidentally pulls a door off its hinges.)
"Azerbaijan has always been famous for its modernistic approach - for its secularism." Mr Abdullayev says. "You know we have been first secular state in the Muslim East. So we develop our relations with different countries based on our national interest - be it Israel, be it Muslim countries."
Mr Abdullayev rejects the reports that Azerbaijan might lease its airbases to Israel. But what would his government do if its ally, Israel, strikes its neighbour, Iran?
"This a hypothetical question which would be difficult to answer," he says. "We think that the Iranian issue has to be resolved diplomatically, peacefully, politically, because anything like that [a military strike] would be disastrous for the whole region, for all of us."
Iranian suspicions
Relations between Azerbaijan and Iran are made more difficult because they share not just a border, but a common heritage.
The Azeri people once lived under the Persian Empire. In 1813, the Treaty of Gulistan after the first Russo-Persian war split the ethnic Azeri people into two.
Those in the north lived under Russian, then Soviet rule - and are now in independent Azerbaijan. Those in the south lived under the Persian Empire - and are now in the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Today, around nine million ethnic Azeris live in Azerbaijan. But even more ethnic Azeris live across the border in Iran. Figures show that there are around 10-20 million Azeris in Iran - around a fifth of the country's population. Millions more Iranians have Azeri ancestry, including Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Among many Azeris there is a desire for reunification.
Simon Aruz is an ethnic Azeri from Iran. He worked as a writer and political activist and campaigned for better rights for the Azeri people in the Persian State. In 2009, he fled the country for Azerbaijan.
"We used to live under pressure in Iran," he says. "We are always thinking about our brothers, our sisters, our family. I hope they can be free soon. "
Such words make Iran suspicious. The government of the Islamic Republic is concerned that Azerbaijan wants to steal both land and people - a charge denied by Azerbaijan's government. The tensions of a shared, divided heritage are now magnified by the different ways in which each government sees the world.
Border tension
The overnight train from Baku to the southern border town of Astara leaves at 11pm and makes its way slowly south, along the coast of the Caspian Sea. Some travellers fall asleep immediately. Others drink and listen to the chorus of frogs outside.
"Ask me anything about the Iranians," says one man who says he is travelling to Astara simply to drop off a music CD with friends. "I know them better than they know themselves."
Early in the morning, the train arrives in Astara. My colleagues and I take a taxi to see the Iranian border. We stop at a gap in the trees half way up a hill.
A group of Polish tourists is already standing by the fence. They are in Azerbaijan to watch a Europa League football match - and happily pose for photos with Iran as their backdrop.
The Islamic republic is just on the other side of the fence. Houses with white walls and red roofs are clearly visible across the valley. Cars in northern Iran head towards the border crossing with Azerbaijan.
The Polish tourists head off to watch their match. After a few minutes the security forces arrive and order my colleagues and me to accompany them to their base.
They inspect the TV pictures we have filmed which show little more than the fields of northern Iran and order us to delete the footage.
They explain that broadcasting the pictures would get them into trouble - they say that they do not want to do anything to increase tension with their Islamic neighbour. The commander, a vocal Wayne Rooney fan, finally drops us off at a hotel in Astara.
At the border crossing itself, crowds of Azeris load up their cars with boxes of food and sweets. Day-to-day goods cost less across the border in Iran. One woman has brought back soap, bananas, biscuits for her grandchildren.
"We are going to Baku," says Ali Mani, a carpet merchant from Iran. "Our friends invited us. There are some restrictions in Iran that we don't see here. It's interesting here.
"We haven't any problem with Azerbaijan and I know Azerbaijan language," adds his friend in English.
Our interpreter asks them in Azeri if they would like to talk about Iran and Israel. They say no, and also decline to have their picture taken.
Next to the border gate, a driver called Ismail stands next to his car. His 23-year-old son is slumped in the front seat, trying to hide from the sun, barely able to move. The two are returning from a trip to hospital in Tehran.
"My son was having treatment here in Azerbaijan but it wasn't doing anything," Ismail says. "The doctors didn't say what his problem was. That's why some people advised me to go to Tehran.
"We went there, they carried out a stomach operation and it was successful. My attitude [towards Iran] is very positive. I went there with big hopes - for my son to be cured there. It was successful. So I'm happy."
Ismail says that his son's operation cost $6,000. He has paid a first instalment to the Iranian hospital and has promised them he will pay the remainder.
Azerbaijan and Iran share both history and mistrust. Their network of competition draws in both the Caucasus and the Middle East.
But for those Azeris on the border Iran is more simple and more immediate. It is a cheaper place to shop, and the only hope to save a son's life.
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As people across the UK cast their votes in the general election their paw-fect pooches have also been exercising their voting rights, and predictably the hashtag #DogsAtPollingstations has become a social media trend.
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By Lamia Estatie & Dhruti ShahBBC News
But, as you'll see, we've noticed that babies, cats and even hedgehogs and guinea pigs are trying to grab a piece of the political pie.
Many posted images of their dogs online after polling booths opened on Thursday morning and the hashtag has been used tens of thousands of times with over 8000 tweets sent in the first two hours of voting.
The election trend also appeared last month in local elections, the EU referendum, and the last general election.
But this year, a new Twitter emoji has been released for those using the hashtag - a terrier donning a union jack. Twitter partnered with The Dogs Trust to encourage use of "Paw-ing Stations" to make dogs joining their owners more comfortable.
But it wasn't just dogs who took a casual stroll to the election booth, as the trend #babiesatpollingstations, also emerged shortly after voting began.
There was an interruption when an unexpected guinea pig popped up:
But the #dogsatpollingstation continues to remain a dominant trend.
You might also like:
Don't forget the working dogs!
Some pooches were unable to make it to the polling station, but didn't want to be left out:
But we couldn't continue without acknowledging the rival #catsatpollingstations trend:
Even Friday the hedgehog wanted a piece of the action:
There's been a lot of competition today though - #horsesatpollingstations anyone?
And finally sheep - perhaps we can get a dog at a the polling station to herd them up:
By the UGC and Social News team
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For millennia lead has held a deep attraction for painters, builders, chemists and winemakers - but historically it's also done untold harm, especially to children. And while it's been banned in petrol, your car still contains several kilograms of it. So have we finally learned how to use lead safely?
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By Laurence KnightBBC News
Element number 82 is one of a handful that mankind has known for millennia. The oldest pure lead, found in Turkey, was made by early smelters more than 8,000 years ago.
That's because lead is very simple to produce. It often comes mixed up with other more coveted minerals, notably silver. And once the ore is out of the ground, thanks to its low melting point, the lead can easily be separated out in an open fire.
One place lead has long been mined is the Derbyshire Dales, at the southern end of the UK's Peak District National Park.
As well as its tourist-friendly natural beauty, the area's volcanic and limestone geology also provided the perfect conditions for mineralising the lead sulphide ore called galena.
For 100 million years the lead just sat there harmlessly, locked up in the rock. Then, 3,000 years ago, people began to dig it up. And then the Romans arrived. And soon enough boatloads of Derbyshire ingots were being shipped back to the Continent.
The Romans were the first to exploit lead on an industrial scale. Ice cores in Greenland contain traces of lead dust from 2,000 years ago, carried on the wind from giant Roman smelters. One of the largest, located in Spain, was operated by tens of thousands of slaves.
Lead found dozens of uses throughout the Empire. Being apparently insoluble, it was used to line aqueducts and make water pipes - the word "plumber" derives from the Latin for lead, plumbum.
"I think of it as the plastic of the past," explains Derbyshire lead mining historian Lynn Willis. "It's flexible, you can cast it into thin sheets, solder it into pipes."
The metal was malleable and seemingly impervious to corrosion, and so - just like modern plastics - it became ubiquitous. And not just in Roman times.
"In a large house in the 17th Century you might find the table covered with [lead tableware], the cisterns holding the water, the drains, the pipes."
Lead has a long association with the building trade, providing a waterproof material for roofing, window frames, and for sealing stone walls. And a heavy lump of lead on a string formed the plumb-line builders used to ensure those walls were vertical.
The metal was found to have other magical properties. Lead carbonate, for example, has provided a cheap, durable paint since ancient times. Known today as "flake white", it was prized by Old Masters such as Rembrandt because of the steadfastness of its colour and the beautiful contrasts it would bring to their oil portraits.
Meanwhile, glassmakers learned that adding in some lead oxide would yield glassware such as wine decanters that would glisten, because the lead refracted the light across a wider arc.
Unfortunately, a leaded crystal wine decanter turns out to be a singularly bad idea, according to Andrea Sella, chemistry professor at University College London, especially if the wine (or sherry, port or brandy) is held in it for a long time.
"The lead slowly dissolves out into the wine itself. The intriguing thing is that you get a compound that used to be known as 'the sugar of lead'."
This compound, lead acetate, not only looks like sugar, it also has an intensely sweet flavour, Prof Sella explains.
"One of the curious things is that the drink that you would put into your decanter would over time gradually become sweeter."
But lead, of course, is also toxic. Once inside the body, it interferes with the propagation of signals through the central nervous system, and it inveigles its way into enzymes, disrupting their role in processing the nutritious elements zinc, iron and calcium.
And so history is littered with examples of people, often unwittingly, enhancing the flavour of their beverages with lead, with horrendous consequences for the health of the end-consumers.
The citizens of Ulm in Germany were plagued by agonising stomach cramps in the 1690s. But it was soon noted at a local monastery that some of the monks, who happened to abstain from drinking the popular local wine, were being spared by God.
The source was eventually identified as a lead oxide sweetener added to the wine - and then eliminated via what was possibly the world's first formal ban on the use of lead.
In England, these same stomach cramps became known as "Devon colic" after a similar 17th Century outbreak, this time caused by the lead used in local cider presses.
Gout could also be brought on by lead poisoning, and became a hallmark of the English nobility in the 18th Century. The apparent cause this time was the 1703 Methuen Treaty between England and Portugal, better known as the "Port Wine Treaty".
It cemented military friendship and favourable trade terms between the two nations, stimulating a booming trade in port. Guess what the wine came laced with? Lead acetate.
Lead-induced gout was all too familiar to the Romans too. They associated it with the morose god Saturn, who ate his own children.
The link was apt. Chronic lead exposure causes depression, headaches, aggression and memory loss. It can also cause sterility, and some suggest this explains the common failure of Roman aristocrats, such as Caesar Augustus, to produce a natural heir.
How were the Romans poisoned? Tiny amounts of lead in water pipes dissolve into soft water (the lime-scale from hard water stops this process). The Romans also handled lead in the form of coins, pots and dishes. And they used it in paints and cosmetics.
However, the biggest probable source was once again wine, specifically a sweetener-cum-preservative the Romans called sapa or defrutum.
The Romans boiled concentrated grape juice down in lead pots into a syrup that helped extend the life of wines. Why lead pots? According to the winemaker Columella, "brass vessels give off copper rust, which has an unpleasant flavour."
The outcome is clear from bones in ancient Roman cemeteries, which contain lead levels more than three times the modern safe limit recommended by the World Health Organization.
Lead: Key facts
Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica
Whether this contributed to the apparent madness of emperors such as Caligula and Nero, and the eventual collapse of the Empire remains a contentious question among classical scholars.
But it's clear that the Industrial Revolution unleashed a new wave of lead poisoning far greater than anything in ancient times, and this time it was the working classes rather than aristocrats who bore the brunt.
Derbyshire lead miners for example were often marked by a black line across their gums - brought on apparently by the chemical reaction between lead in the miners' blood and sulphur released by bacteria in the mouth, after they had eaten certain kinds of food, including eggs.
The worst affected were those employed in smelting or in the manufacture of lead-based paints, who found themselves surrounded daily by lead fumes.
Take the Sheffield paintworks, for example. After three months at the works, employees typically developed a skull-like complexion of pallid skin and dark recessed eyes, Willis says. Melancholy, pain, infertility and death followed.
"In the 1870s, the doctor reported that six people out of 70-80 had died the previous year," says Willis. But he also noted that in his father's time in the 1830s they had died "like sheep".
Given that lead poisoning had been around so long, the actions of the chemist Thomas Midgley Jr appear to have been reckless in the extreme. He is the man who put lead in petrol.
In 1921 as a brilliant young chemist at General Motors he discovered that adding the compound tetra-ethyl lead made engines run more efficiently, eliminating the uncontrolled knocking of early motorcars.
The product was marketed as the benign-sounding "ethyl". When challenged about the dangers of the lead content, Midgley called a press conference at which he poured the chemical over his hands and breathed in its vapour for a full minute, claiming he could do so every day without ill effect.
In reality, both before and after this incident Midgley spent months plagued by the effects of lead poisoning. GM's ethyl plant in New Jersey, meanwhile, was forced to close after several workers went mad and some died. The press renamed ethyl "looney gas".
Midgley was a tragic individual.
Later in life he contracted polio and became bed-ridden, so he designed a system of pulleys to raise himself up - only one day he became entangled in them and died of asphyxiation.
However, the greatest tragedy was his legacy. It was Midgley who invented chlorofluorocarbons - CFCs - the refrigerant gases later found to be responsible for opening up the hole in the ozone layer and increasing the incidence of skin cancer. And cars - far more of them than Midgley could have conceived of in the 1920s - would continue to belch out lead bromide fumes for decades.
Although this was a far more dilute source of poisoning than Roman sapa or the fug of a Victorian paintworks, it was incomparably more far-reaching, affecting every city on the planet. And this time the victims were children.
It was another American, the paediatric psychiatrist Herbert Needleman, who was responsible for finally getting the lead taken out of petrol.
In the 1970s and 1980s he discovered that even very low levels of lead exposure did irreversible damage to infants, including unborn babies. As they grew up, their IQs were lower, they had trouble concentrating, and often dropped out of school.
As young adults, data suggested, they were more likely to become bullies, delinquents, criminals, teenage parents, drug addicts, unemployed, and so on. Needleman concluded that the lead had permanently weakened their ability to resist dangerous impulses.
Thanks in large part to Needleman's work, the US began phasing out tetraethyl lead in 1975, and most of the planet followed suit. Yet it is only now that the possible scale of the harm done by lead poisoning is becoming apparent.
That's because many academics now believe leaded petrol was responsible for a global crime wave that peaked in the 1990s.
One such is economist Jessica Wolpaw Reyes of Amherst College in the US. "When we had leaded generations in the 1960s and 1970s, they would have been far more likely to commit crimes, especially violent crimes, in the 80s and 90s," she says.
She found that the timing of when petroleum companies phased out leaded petrol in individual US states between 1975 and 1996 mapped closely to when their respective crime statistics peaked two decades later.
Other studies looking at the difference between countries worldwide found similar results. However, the link between lead and crime is still disputed, with plenty of other explanations forwarded for the global drop in crime rates.
Meanwhile, the drive to eliminate lead from the environment continues. Lead paint is also on the way out. Needleman claimed that it was almost as big a source of poisoning as petrol in the modern world.
All paints, even durable lead-based ones, are prone to crumble eventually. But being a chemical element, the lead never breaks down or disappears. Instead, the dust can be inhaled, or the sweet-tasting flakes can be consumed by a curious toddler.
In the UK the ban has extended beyond bulk household paints to include artists' suppliers, such as the 150-year-old L Cornelissen in London's Bloomsbury.
"It is a traditional paint and has passed the test of many, many centuries," says the shop's owner, Nicholas Walt, ruefully. "Petrol's pretty dangerous too, but we've learned how to handle it, and it's a shame that we can't do the same with flake white."
Lead can still be found as a radiation shield at your doctor's surgery, or as a roof lining material in northern Europe. It's also being used to waterproof and immobilise subsea electric cables for offshore windfarms.
But the biggest use by far is, ironically enough, still in your car. Almost 90% of lead is used to make batteries. Some of them sit in hospitals or mobile phone beacons to provide back-up power in case the grid goes down. But most of them are used to start people's cars every morning.
Lead is not the most obvious metal for a car battery. Coming from the bottom of the periodic table, it is exceptionally dense, and a great weight to carry around - about as far from a lithium battery as you can get.
However, unlike other batteries, it will provide the initial surge of energy needed to get your engine moving, again and again for years, without breaking. Even hybrid and fully electric cars typically contain a lead acid battery to complement their main lithium or metal-hydride one.
And now for the good news: Unlike a can of leaded petrol, a lead-acid battery is a sealed unit. The lead never escapes. And that remains true even at the end of the battery's life.
"Lead has the highest recycling rate of any metal," says Dr Andy Bush, head of the International Lead Association. "The recycling rate in Europe and North America [for batteries] is 99%."
He says this isn't just because of environmental regulations. Lead is a very easy metal to recycle.
That much is clear from a visit to the HJ Enthoven recycling plant at Darley Dale - a last vestige of the Derbyshire lead mining industry.
They take lead batteries, then smash them to pieces in a contained unit. That makes extracting the metallic lead a simple task as it just sinks to the bottom. Lead is also recovered from the sulphurous electrolyte fluid.
All that molten lead is then poured into ingots that can be sent straight back to a battery manufacturer. Even the recovered plastic gets turned back into battery casings.
"It's a completely closed loop," says the plant's manager, Peter Allbutt. "This is a material that is recyclable again and again and again."
All the same, you may still be surrounded by lead that doesn't form part of this loop. It remains in some old pipes and in older layers of household paint.
Amazingly, a handful of countries - Iraq, Yemen, Burma, North Korea - continue to use leaded petrol. And there are many more countries in the world, including India and China, which are still getting to grips with the pollution from their lead smelting industries.
And in some places it's found its way into the earth.
In the Derbyshire Dales, the average lead content in the region's soil, at 0.05%, is 10 times the UK national average. In some hotspots - downwind from old smelters, or where miners dumped their spoils - it can be as high as 3%.
And it will just continue to sit there, until someone cleans it up.
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New year, new ideas, time to broaden your horizons? For sporting stars, this might involve participating in a high-profile charitable campaign. After all, nothing announces your arrival as a sporting legend quite like attaching your name to a good cause.
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By Bill WilsonBusiness reporter, BBC News
Former top footballers such as David Beckham and Didier Drogba have been involved in widely publicised ventures in Africa, while boxer Tyson Fury recently vowed to donate his substantial purse from the Deontay Wilder fight to the homeless.
"When I go home I'm going to build some homes for the homeless and set up some funds for drug addicts and alcoholics," he said in the US last month.
Others, such as athlete Dame Kelly Holmes, have established their own foundation or fund, to assist chosen causes such as social inclusion or literacy.
Indeed in the modern world it is hard to find a sporting celebrity - from Cristiano Ronaldo to Serena Williams - who has not dipped into their resources of money or time for charitable causes.
The former has helped earthquake victims and the latter has help establish educational centres in east Africa, among their varied philanthropic ventures.
What's the motivation?
But why would high-earning and high-profile sporting names who seem to have it all - jet-set lifestyles, adulation and huge material wealth - choose to get involved with altruistic initiatives?
Are they merely PR and brand-building exercises, a means of countering public perceptions that sportspeople are pampered and overpaid?
Prof Jen Shang is a philanthropic psychologist at Plymouth University, and says that the reasons for getting involved can be complex, and are not usually driven by cynical concerns such as monetary gains or fame.
"Looking at philanthropy in sport, and other professions, one may start out in one's career being motivated by external factors such as money or honours. But after a period of time it is unlikely that people are motivated so much by external rewards, and more by internal drives," she says.
"Top sportspeople might say to themselves, 'I am achieving so much in my regular role, I would like to branch out and see what is out there in the wider world.'
"And when they become involved in philanthropy, they then find the same sense of reward that they experienced when they started their careers."
'Wellbeing'
Prof Shang adds: "The reason people choose to give money to a cause that is not materially benefitting them is because it is meeting some need.
"By 'need', in my research I use the definition of psychological wellbeing. One's philanthropy can make a major difference, not just to others but to one's self."
Prof Shang says that, if they so desire, sportspeople can eventually become "fluent in philanthropy" by using skills learned in their sporting careers - attributes such as risk management, business management and people skills.
She adds: "They are faced by challenges they would not get in their normal environment. Often they have to provide money, time and a lot of tenacity if they are to make their ventures sustainable.
"Problems can be more complex, which is why they often need time and space to develop their philanthropic identities."
A charitable foundation: Liverpool star James Milner
James Milner officially launched his charitable foundation in the 2011-12 season, and since then has donated around half a million pounds to charitable causes including leukaemia organisation Bloodwise, the NSPCC and Help For Heroes.
Two recent high-profile events have included a Celtic v Liverpool legends Match for Cancer at Celtic Park in front of 20,000 fans, and the foundation's annual ball, attending by Liverpool teammates and manager Jurgen Klopp.
Some £170,000 was raised at each event.
"He is fairly quiet and not usually in the news, but it is good to see him now getting some recognition as a model professional and highly respected player," says PFA players' union official John Hudson, a trustee of the player's foundation.
"Off the pitch he has been a massive advocate for putting something back. James has been really passionate about wanting to go along this road."
'Sustained commitment'
Footballers can often set up charities as an after-thought to a benefit year, or as a way of attempting to manage the many charitable requests put to them by different causes.
"I get a lot of calls from agents saying, 'My player wants to set up a charity,'" says John Hudson, director of corporate social responsibility at footballers' union the PFA.
"I tell them to get the player to call me, and that it is about doing things for the right reason, because you are interested in a cause."
But as Mr Hudson, who for the past five years has been offering advice to players about charities and wider social responsibility issues, says, it is not something to be done lightly.
"Charitable foundations might not always be the right thing for a player. Often they don't realise it involves trustees, company guidelines, Charity Commission guidelines, financial and legal frameworks.
"It is really important that it is set up the right way. We help with funding for players who want to set up a charity, we pay the legal costs to establish the proper regulatory framework.
"If they do want to go ahead I tell them they will need the right people as trustees. There then needs to be sustained commitment. There is nothing worse than a charity that is dormant."
'Raising awareness'
He points to charitable organisations that are run by footballers doing good work away from the glare of the spotlight, but which have highly committed backers.
These include the Russell Martin Foundation run by the Walsall player and former Scotland international, and the Jason Roberts Foundation, run by the ex-Grenada international and West Brom, Portsmouth and Blackburn star.
The PFA is now working with former Liverpool, Bradford and Bolton player Stephen Darby, whose career was brought to a halt at the age of 29 after being diagnosed with motor neurone disease.
"We are looking to set up a foundation with him, as he wants to raise awareness of the illness," says Mr Hudson.
"As well as getting the message out there he wants to do something practical, such as raising money for things like specialist physios."
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Each week we feature pictures shared with us from across Oxfordshire.
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Find out how you can join in and submit your images and videos below.
If you have a great image of the county send it to us by email to [email protected].
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Despite this being an age of complicated financial affairs and intricate family relationships, more than two-thirds of people in the UK don't have a will. So why do so many people simply refuse to make one?
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By Lucy TownsendBBC News Magazine
Wills, or the lack of, have formed the basis of many a fascinating story. From Dickens to EastEnders, they have made and broken lives, ripped apart families and created millionaires.
But as much as people might be fascinated by others' tales of surprise windfalls or bitter disinheritance, when it comes to our own affairs, it seems we suffer a serious case of ostrich syndrome.
Only three in 10 people in the UK have a will. Last year the Treasury gained £53m from people who died intestate - without a will. The year before it was £76m. And yet the fractured nature of modern families and an increasingly litigious society means making a will has never been so important.
So what is it about signing on the dotted line that leaves people so nervous? And is the whole notion of wills about age or assets?
November is Make a Will Month, when the £85 fee that would usually go to the solicitor will instead be donated to Will Aid, a charity that distributes the money to worthy causes. So it seems as good a time as any for me to put my assets in order.
The first thing my solicitor tells me is that making a will does not mean I am about to die.
The next is that I filled out my preliminary form incorrectly, accidentally cutting out my entire family.
The language of wills is confusing. Steeped in history, it is formed on precedents of circumlocution. As mere laymen faced with the already daunting task of contemplating our death, navigating legal jargon makes it all the more stressful.
"The language is getting better," says Nick Hall, of London's Davenport Lyons, the man charged with writing my will. "We are trying to make it clearer, but there are precedents decided by law and the language is part of that."
The role of solicitors is to tell people what things mean, he suggests.
"I have dealt with wills that people have written themselves, from the internet or from shop bought templates, and they have been totally invalid.
"One I saw only had room for one witness signature - it has to be two. Another client I had wanted to leave all his golf clubs to his best friend, but his best friend was the witness - which means that was invalid - he could never get his golf clubs."
Of course, a cynic might argue that solicitors have just a whiff of vested interest in suggesting DIY wills are a legal minefield that should be avoided.
Off-the-shelf wills are popular. They can be quick and cheap and there are plenty that are perfectly valid if filled in correctly. WHSmith has sold more than a million of its £9.99 Will Packs.
Or you could save yourself even that and go fully DIY.
As with any task, the more complicated the parameters, the more likely you are to think about getting a professional in.
By the end of my meeting with the solicitor, I realise making a will is not a harrowing process. I didn't die as I left his office and it's not particularly complicated, but then neither is my situation.
It can be for families where the parents are unmarried and have children. Here things have the potential to become more problematic and not having a will can have devastating effects.
Richard Moore died in 2009, suddenly, from a pulmonary embolism. He did not leave a will.
"After his death, we were advised that as he was not married and had no dependants his estate would be shared equally between his surviving parents," says his brother Dr Jeremy Moore.
"Richard's biological father played almost no part in his upbringing. My mother divorced my father in the early 1970s. We never saw him. He was not part of our lives."
But Richard's biological father accepted his full entitlement.
"It was my mother's responsibility to find my father, pay legal fees and then meet the costs of tracking him down," says Dr Moore. "Then it was not just a question of him having half of my brother's money, we had to sell his home and his possessions - his CDs, DVDs, his clothes - all for this man, a stranger, who didn't even send us a birthday card in our entire lives."
But despite the horror stories there are many people who would rather not face up to making a will.
Stephen Travis and Joanna Thompson have lived together in their Brighton home for 10 years. They have a son, they are not married and they have no will.
"Making a will is not something that I have ever thought about," says Travis. "It isn't a priority. It's morbid and I don't like thinking about it. It's also a tricky thing to bring up without sounding like you want to ensure your inheritance."
But if the worst happened to her partner, Thompson would be left with nothing. The house they share was originally his, and while they have shared the mortgage for 10 years if he died Joanna would have no claim. All Stephen's assets would be passed directly to his three-year-old son. Leaving Joanna to cope on her own until their son comes of age.
Some parents have been forced to effectively sue their own children just so they have enough cash to live.
Worse still - what would happen to their little boy should they both die?
The solicitors who make wills encounter many reasons for reluctance.
Many people just can't face the prospect of contemplating their own mortality, says Charles Neal, partner at Bell & Buxton Solicitors in Sheffield.
"Others don't like trying to decide between family and friends who gets what," says Neal. "Some think it is something that people have to do in old age, some don't like the paperwork."
And the reason for having a will is to make things easier for your nearest and dearest if you do suddenly die.
But I still have not signed my will, because it is thought provoking and sad. Seeing my Last Will and Testament, bound in card and bearing my name, was a strange, almost out-of-body, experience.
I felt like Reggie Perrin. But equally, as soon as it is signed I can put it in a drawer and concentrate on living. Maybe it is not such a big deal after all.
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Cash has been taking a beating lately.
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By David WolmanAuthor and journalist
Last week, Canada minted its last penny. Eurozone countries are working to restrict cash payments. Bitcoin is all the rage.
Payments start-ups such as Square and iZettle are on a cash-killing mission, while non-profit organisations, governments, the World Bank, small businesses, multinational corporations, app developers, hippies, libertarians, liberals, right-wingers all have agendas that can be advanced by alternatives to cash, and they're all pushing to bring them about.
But like forecasts of flying cars, predictions of a cashless future have a history of failure.
This is in part because progress is incremental, and in part because physical money is a time-tested technology.
It's fast, widely accepted, anonymous and useful for old-school budgeting and when the power goes out.
Yet powerful forces are aligning against cash.
Together, they provide a glimpse of what a cashless or mostly cashless future might look like, and illuminate the promise of digital money, irrespective of whether cash is ever kaput or just increasingly marginalised.
Faster and cheaper
The battery against cash is coming from three fronts - new technologies, scepticism about the stewardship of sovereign currencies and increased enthusiasm for alternative currencies, and greater scrutiny about cash's myriad costs.
(Think anti-counterfeiting cops and armoured trucks, bank security, tax evasion, terrorists using 200-euro or $100 notes to buy explosives, and every cash-related crime ever.)
Digital money innovations, particularly tools anchored to mobile phones, offer faster and cheaper ways to pay bills, buy and sell goods, send and receive money and make bank transactions.
Alternative currencies, meanwhile, are moving from the fringe to the centre, as more and more people worry about the long-term value of coin of the realm.
Angst about government currencies has traditionally sent people flocking to gold, and for many devotees of the shiny stuff, gold remains the one and forever answer.
But gold is not value incarnate. It's just another commodity, albeit a historically pivotal and impressively hefty one.
Those who grasp that fact, yet still distrust central bank-issued currencies, are turning to local and online options, barter exchanges, and the crypto-currency Bitcoin.
But the most consequential aspect of this monetary revolution is growing recognition that the costs of cash fall disproportionately on the poor.
When was the last time you saw a wealthy person patronise a cheque-cashing service, use Western Union or visit a payday lender (for an above-board transaction, I mean)?
Cash is expensive not merely because of the risk of being robbed at the cash machine or losing your savings to a fire, flood or abusive spouse.
It's also expensive because of steep prices paid in time, fees and opportunity costs. For you and me, those costs are, by and large, nominal.
But for the billions of people who subsist on $2 (£1.28) a day, they are anything but.
Going mobile
Digital tools are already providing millions of people worldwide with the opportunity to avoid cash. And avoid it they do.
They are storing value and transacting by way of electronic accounts "on" their mobile phones.
For the first time, people who were trapped in the informal economy can steer clear of usurious local moneylenders, save precious time and money, and benefit from the basic financial services that you and I take for granted.
And no, looping people into the formal economy isn't a clandestine Valentine to banks and bankers.
The fact is that a bank account, online bill, person-to-person payment, access to credit, insurance - all of these tools for building economic stability depend on money in electronic form.
If you don't have that, it's far more difficult to climb permanently out of poverty.
The truth is that it doesn't matter all that much whether cash's further marginalisation ever leads to extinction.
What matters far more is the potential for digital money innovations to improve the welfare of so many.
David Wolman is a contributing editor at Wired and the author of The End of Money, due out in paperback this autumn.
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When I first settled in Rome in the early 1970s, it was common knowledge among resident foreign journalists that you could get a much better exchange rate for the Italian lira from your dollars or pounds by visiting the Vatican's own bank, situated inside a medieval tower next to the Apostolic Palace inside Vatican City.
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By David WilleyBBC News, Rome
So, showing my press pass, I climbed the stairs into this strange Holy of Holies, where the only other clients in the marble-lined banking hall were priests and nuns.
I wrote out a cheque, which the bank clerk cashed after checking my identity. He handed me about 10% more lira than if I had made the transaction in one of the commercial banks just down the street in Italian territory. I had just discovered my very own offshore fiscal paradise.
Thus began my short-lived but instructive introductory course into Vatican banking. A few months later, someone leaked what was happening and I could no longer gain access to the Vatican's financial inner sanctum.
Divine appreciation
Then I got to know the Most Reverend Paul Marcinkus, a giant of a priest, who hailed from Chicago, and who had been appointed by Pope Paul VI in 1971 to head the Vatican Bank, the "Institute for the Works of Religion", or IOR in Italian.
Pope Paul wanted to show his appreciation of the archbishop's efforts as chief organiser of the first ever visit by a pontiff to the Holy Land in 1964, where he had been the Pope's constant bodyguard and translator.
I learned with some surprise that the archbishop had no previous specialist knowledge of international banking. In fact, upon his appointment he had been sent off to Harvard University for a six-week crash course to learn the rudiments of international high finance.
During the 1980s, the archbishop got involved in some shady dealings, first with a Mafia-linked Sicilian banker called Michele Sindona, and then with an Italian financier called Roberto Calvi, president of the Banco Ambrosiano, which eventually collapsed with huge debts involving losses of at least $250m (£165m) to the IOR, one of the Banco's shareholders.
Mr Calvi eventually ended up dead, hanging from a rope under Blackfriars Bridge in London, victim of a faked suicide. The archbishop was wanted for questioning by Italian prosecutors, not in connection with what turned out to be a Mafia murder, but over the Vatican Bank's losses incurred through the setting up of phony offshore shell companies in the Bahamas.
But the burly archbishop successfully claimed diplomatic immunity, taking refuge inside the Vatican at one point.
He had a sardonic attitude to his work. "When my workers come to retire, they expect a pension," he once told a friend of mine. "It's no use my saying: I'll pay you in 400 Hail Marys!"
Broken promises
Fast forward to the present. The Vatican Bank has once again been in the eye of a storm of scandal. It has been accused of money laundering and lack of due diligence in allowing non-religious, and even crony, businessmen to hold accounts in what amounts to an international offshore tax haven.
Pope Benedict XVI attempted in 2010 to bring the IOR back on course by creating a financial information authority to monitor its performance - but promises of greater financial transparency clearly failed to materialise.
A boardroom row erupted in 2012, and Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, an Italian economist then at the head of the bank, stormed out of a meeting chaired by Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican's secretary of state, and resigned.
Mr Gotti Tedeschi is the author of an economic textbook entitled Money and Paradise: The Global Economy and the Catholic World.
His post remained empty for nine months and then, on the very eve of Pope Benedict's retirement last February, the pontiff appointed a German banker, Ernst Von Freyberg, to head the IOR.
Money laundering
Now, another series of IOR bombshells have burst.
Paolo Cipriani, director of the bank, and his deputy Marco Tullio have resigned after the arrest by Italian tax police of a Vatican monsignore who used to work as a senior account manager in the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See (APSA), which manages Vatican real estate holdings. The monsignore, Nunzio Scarano, is being questioned in jail over allegations of money laundering, corruption and fraud.
Pope Francis is scandalised and angry at the goings on behind the scenes at the IOR. He has decided to begin his planned clean-up of the Roman Curia, the central government of the Church, with a complete shakeup at the IOR.
Vatican security officers have been instructed to freeze any attempt to meddle with IOR documents, while an internal commission of inquiry with wide powers prepares a secret report on the current financial shenanigans, for the eyes of Pope Francis only.
The Vatican Bank is a damaged brand at a moment when the Pope is urging his flock to turn their attention to the plight of the world's poor. There has been speculation that one of Pope Francis' options could be to dissolve the IOR altogether and hand over the Vatican's entire banking operations to a reliable commercial bank.
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Britain's second biggest police service was launched on 1 April, 2013. Eight forces became one in the biggest overhaul of law enforcement north of the border since 1967. As Police Scotland turns five, BBC Scotland looks back at its challenges, from unspeakable tragedies to misconduct allegations.
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By Paul O'HareBBC Scotland news website
Shock waves as police helicopter crashes killing 10
(Year one 2013-14)
The Scottish government said one country-wide police service would lead to savings of £1.7bn over 15 years.
Under the old model Scotland had eight chief constables, nine deputy chief constables and 13 assistant chief constables costing £4.8m a year.
The new streamlined force would have one chief constable - Sir Stephen House - four deputy chief constables and six assistant chief constables at a cost of less than £2m a year.
The Scottish Crime and Drug Enforcement Agency was also absorbed into the force in a bid to save money and its challenging brief became the responsibility of the Specialist Crime Division.
Another new feature was the launch of the non-emergency 101 number.
In the early days inevitable problems ranged from IT issues to power struggles between Sir Stephen and the Scottish Police Authority (SPA).
The former Strathclyde Police chief continued to make domestic abuse a key priority and deployed a strategy he described as "intrusive intervention".
The force also had to deal with a 27% increase in rape allegations, a spike attributed to the Savile effect and victims being more confident about coming forward.
Police Scotland's first high-profile murder investigation was a drugs-related shooting in an Edinburgh suburb.
On 26 May Mohammed Abdi was killed at point-blank range with a sub-machine gun following a car chase in Duddingston.
Four men were later prosecuted and jailed for a minimum of 25 years.
But the defining event of the force's first year occurred at 22:25 on Friday 29 November.
As the police helicopter returned to Glasgow from a routine operation it crashed into the roof of The Clutha bar on the banks of the Clyde.
The pilot, two police officers on board and seven men who were drinking in the pub were killed.
The tragedy hit the force hard and Sir Stephen later recalled the moment he took a call from the duty inspector in Helen Street.
He said: "The fact that so many people died in such a completely unforeseen way was very shocking.
"Most of them were enjoying a good night out listening to a band then, all of a sudden, they were injured or they were dead.
"Even if it hadn't been three of our people, it would have been emotional for us."
A report published in 2015 by the Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB) said the pilot did not follow emergency protocol and flew on despite low fuel warnings.
It also concluded fuel transfer pumps were turned off and a controlled landing was not achieved for "unknown reasons".
The Crown Office concluded there was no evidence to justify criminal proceedings but confirmed a Fatal Accident Inquiry will be held, with the first hearing likely to take place in the autumn.
From judicial triumphs to bin lorry tragedy
(Year two 2014-15)
Two of Scotland's most notorious cold case killers were finally brought to justice in 2014.
In June former soldier John Docherty, 49, was convicted of the 1986 murder of Greenock teenager Elaine Doyle.
And in November serial killer Angus Sinclair was found guilty of the 1977 World's End murders.
Sinclair, 69, also became the first person in Scotland to be retried for the same crime after an acquittal, following a change in the double jeopardy law.
The force also faced its biggest security challenge as Glasgow hosted the Commonwealth Games.
A 24-hour control room was set up in Govan for the multi-sports event, which featured stars such as Usain Bolt and Sally Pearson.
Fortunately it passed without incident and was widely regarded as a major triumph for the city.
The following month Police Scotland successfully co-ordinated another massive operation as Gleneagles staged golf's Ryder Cup.
Armed policing came under fire after politicians in the Borders and Highlands raised concerns about officers carrying weapons while on routine patrol.
The move followed the publication of photos showing police wearing gun belts in shopping centres.
By October, in a move described by opposition politicians as a u-turn, the force confirmed specialist armed police officers would only be deployed to firearms incidents or where there is a threat to life.
On the plus side, it emerged the level of recorded crime in Scotland had reached its lowest level in 40 years.
A few days later a candlelit vigil marked the first anniversary of The Clutha helicopter crash.
But on 22 December officers had to deal with another devastating tragedy in Glasgow city centre.
At about 14:30 a bin lorry ploughed into pedestrians before crashing into the Millennium Hotel in George Square.
Six people, including three members of the same family, were killed and 17 were injured.
A Fatal Accident Inquiry heard driver Harry Clarke had a history of health issues but had not disclosed his medical background to his employers or the DVLA.
Sheriff John Beckett QC, who chaired the FAI, ruled the crash might have been avoided if Clarke had told the truth about his medical history.
It also emerged he had previously blacked out while working as a bus driver but failed to disclose it when he became a bin lorry driver with Glasgow City Council.
Families of the victims later launched private prosecutions against Clarke but the move was rejected by the Court of Session.
In February 2015 BBC Scotland revealed the force had reneged on a commitment to abolish stop searches on young children.
This was despite Assistant Chief Constable Wayne Mawson telling a Holyrood committee in June that the "indefensible" practice of consensual searches of under 12s would be scrapped.
Call centre catastrophe
(Year three 2015-16)
The first month of year three included a chilling murder in Glasgow and Britain's biggest ever drugs seizure off the coast of Aberdeen.
The body of Irish student Karen Buckley, 24, was found in a barrel on a farm four days after she went missing.
Her killer Alexander Pacteau, 21, was later jailed for a minimum of 23 years.
In the north police assisted the National Crime Agency-led investigation which led to the recovery of £500m of cocaine.
But the euphoria of Operation Screenplay was short lived and the summer of 2015 remains the most turbulent period in the force's history.
On 3 May officers responded to reports of a man behaving erratically and carrying a knife in Kirkcaldy, Fife.
Sheku Bayou, who was unarmed, was arrested but died after being restrained by officers.
The Police Investigations and Review Commissioner (Pirc) submitted a report into the incident to the Crown Office in August 2016 and a fatal accident inquiry is due to take place.
But relatives of Mr Bayoh, 31, last month criticised the Crown Office as it has yet to decide whether officers should face criminal charges.
The murder of gangland enforcer Kevin "Gerbil" Carroll, was one of the most high profile investigations the new force inherited from Strathclyde Police.
Carroll, 29, was shot dead in front of lunchtime shoppers outside Asda in Robroyston, Glasgow in January 2010.
The prime suspect, William Paterson, fled to Spain but was eventually arrested and jailed for 22 years.
His conviction, aided by the fact the murder weapon was dumped behind Coatbridge Library, was a major coup as such crimes are notoriously difficult to solve.
But the defining event of the last five years was the force's response to a road traffic accident on the M9, near Stirling.
John Yuill and Lamara Bell were last seen leaving Loch Earn in the early hours of Sunday 5 July.
Later that day police were informed about a car which had left the motorway but the call handler failed to dispatch a crew to investigate.
It was only when a second call was made on the Wednesday that the couple were discovered.
Mr Yuill, 28, was dead and Ms Bell, 25, who suffered broken bones and kidney damage caused by dehydration, died in hospital four days later.
Amid the fall-out Sir Stephen confirmed information from the initial call had not been entered into police systems.
The chief constable also apologised and admitted the force had "failed both families".
An HMIC report later identified weaknesses in the roll-out of the national call handling system.
The Pirc is reviewing the handling of the incident and has submitted a report to the Crown Office which has yet to publish its decision.
After weeks of negative headlines Sir Stephen announced he would be standing down - nine months before his contract was due to expire.
The best police work often takes place in the shadows and in August three men were jailed for planning to murder two former leaders of the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) in Scotland.
A complex and lengthy covert surveillance operation helped convict Antoin Duffy, 39, his cousin Martin Hughes, 36, and Paul Sands, 32, of plotting to kill Johnny "Mad Dog" Adair and Sam McCrory.
The following month Justice Secretary Michael Matheson confirmed Police Scotland would stop carrying out non-statutory stop-and-searches of adults and children following a review of the controversial practice by John Scott QC.
The force's problems went from bad to worse in November when a watchdog ruled Police Scotland's Counter Corruption Unit broke rules to obtain details of a journalist's sources.
In December former National Crime Agency deputy director Phil Gormley was named as Sir Stephen's replacement.
After a torrid few months the move offered a fresh start for the force.
Mr Gormley later told MSPs that his approach to the job will be about "collaboration and trust".
An astonishing year ended with one of the force's most harrowing investigations.
About 08:21 on 19 March a CCTV camera in Clydebank, West Dunbartonshire captured Paige Docherty, 15, walking into John Leathem's deli.
The teenager's body was found in a wooded area two days later.
She had more than 140 injuries and been stabbed 61 times.
Leathem, 32, later admitted killing Paige and was ordered to spend a minimum of 23 years in jail.
Unlawful breach of spying rules
(Year four 2016-17)
The 2016 Scottish Cup Final proved to be the force's most challenging sporting event and led to 180 arrests.
The Hampden pitch invasion that followed Hibernian's Scottish Cup victory over Rangers also set in motion a massive CCTV trawl which saw dozens of stills released and shared on social media.
In August a judicial tribunal which investigated whether Police Scotland breached spying guidelines ruled the force acted "unlawfully".
Officers had been attempting to find out how information about the investigation into the murder of Emma Caldwell in 2005 had appeared in the media.
In October Ronnie Coulter was convicted of the 1998 murder of Surjit Singh Chhokar, 32, in Overtown, North Lanarkshire
His conviction was only the second time in Scottish legal history that an accused had been tried twice for the same crime.
Meanwhile, Audit Scotland urged the force to urgently reassess its IT needs after the collapse of a multi-million pound computer project.
The year ended with an increase in the number of armed police officers patrolling Scotland's streets in the wake of the Westminster terror attack.
Deputy Chief Constable Johnny Gwynne also confirmed officers with tasers would be stationed at the Scottish Parliament.
While other parts of the UK have been targeted by terrorists the last notable incident in Scotland was the Glasgow Airport attack in 2007.
Embattled chief constable resigns his position
(Year five 2017-18)
The previous 12 months have been defined by a leadership crisis at both the SPA and Police Scotland.
In May MSPs on the justice sub-committee on policing said it did not have confidence in the leadership of SPA chairman Andrew Flanagan.
He came under fire at a series of Holyrood inquiries about governance and transparency.
The following month Mr Flanagan announced his resignation but said he would stay on until a replacement was appointed.
In July the spotlight switched to Police Scotland after Mr Gormley confirmed he was under investigation for misconduct.
The Chief Constable continued his duties but on 8 September it emerged he had taken "special leave" after a second complaint was made.
Meanwhile, former Labour health minister Susan Deacon was appointed as the new chair for of the SPA.
In the weeks that followed a fifth complaint was made about Mr Gormley's conduct and his wife, Claire, gave a newspaper interview in which she defended her husband and condemned the Pirc probe .
The force faced a further blow when Assistant Chief Constable Bernard Higgins was one of four officers suspended at the end of November.
Mr Higgins, who denies any wrongdoing, returned to work last month but the Pirc is still investigating allegations of criminal behaviour and gross misconduct.
A notable triumph saw the Organised Crime and Counter Terrorism Unit bring one of Britain's most sophisticated and dangerous crime groups to justice.
The nine-man gang were jailed for 87 years following a massive investigation into crimes including kidnap, torture, drug trafficking and the importation of firearms.
By the end of January a seventh complaint had been made against Mr Gormley and on 7 February he announced his resignation.
The following week his predecessor was back in the news after the Met confirmed it had appointed Sir Stephen House as an assistant commissioner.
Last month saw a conclusion to two of the most unusual cases the force has investigated.
Former A&E consultant Dr Martin Watt was found guilty of possessing firearms with intent to endanger life.
And juror Catherine Leahy, 62, was convicted of taking a bribe during a five-month money laundering and drug trafficking trial.
Detectives also brought Banff man Connor Ward, 25, to justice for planning terrorism attacks.
As year five ended a major survey found people in Scotland feel safer walking alone at night than ever before.
What next for Police Scotland?
(Year six and beyond)
The SPA's top priority for the year ahead is the appointment of a new Chief Constable.
The recruitment drive will be launched in the summer and the successful candidate will take up the post by the end of the year.
Iain Livingstone, who delayed his retirement to take over as Mr Gormley last November, is the frontrunner but the job will attract interest from across the UK.
Both previous incumbents left under a cloud and it is critical that the new chief generates headlines for all the right reasons.
The force continues to face major financial pressures and the Auditor General previously warned it faces a £188m funding gap by 2020/21.
The controversial merger between the force and British Transport Police, which had been due to take place in April 2019, also has to be resolved.
Finally, the force must continue to adapt to the changing nature of offending, especially the boom in cyber crime, as it bids to implement its ambitious Policing 2026 strategy.
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S4C managers are to lose benefits such as company cars and private insurance, the TV channel has announced.
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Chief executive Ian Jones said the move was part of plans to save money.
He said nine company cars will go in September - saving £50,000 - and health insurance at the end of the year.
The channel's public funding is being cut by a quarter from £102m to £75m by 2015. There have been viewer complaints about recent changes to the S4C schedule due to reduced budgets.
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A teenage girl has been raped in a park in Southampton.
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The 17-year-old was assaulted shortly after 10:00 GMT on Thursday in Houndwell Park, according to reports made to Hampshire Constabulary.
Officers are currently conducting inquiries at the scene and the area has been cordoned off.
The force said that the "investigation is in its very early stages and remains ongoing", and has appealed for any witnesses to come forward.
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In terms of health and care, there were two eye-catching numbers in the chancellor's spending announcement - £6.2bn extra for the NHS and £1.5bn for social care in England - but neither is quite what it seems.
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Nick TriggleHealth correspondent@nicktriggleon Twitter
The £6.2bn refers to the extra cash the front line of the NHS will receive next year as part of the five-year settlement announced a year ago by then Prime Minister Theresa May. And it takes the total available to NHS England, to pay for services from hospital care to GP practices and ambulance crews, to nearly £130bn.
The increase amounts to a 3.4% above-inflation rise - and while that may seem generous when compared with other areas of public spending, it is still less of a rise than the NHS has traditionally be given throughout its history.
What is new, however, is how much extra the rest of health is being given. This is money that goes on a range of other things, such as buildings maintenance and training for staff. And the money available for those areas is rising by £400m to £9bn.
The extra money is welcome but still leaves the NHS playing catch up, with waiting lists growing and a huge backlog in buildings maintenance, according to the Institute for Public Policy Research.
"The legacy of austerity continues," says the IPPR's Chris Thomas, "leaving our cherished health service under significant strain."
The social-care announcement, meanwhile, is genuinely new. The £1.5bn is made up of:
What could that money do for adult social care? About £30bn a year is set to be spent by councils on social-care services this year - a third of which goes on children.
So if two-thirds of the extra £1.5bn goes on adult services, that would represent a 5% increase in funding. That is pretty significant but then the demands being placed on care services are pretty significant too.
The County Councils Network believes the extra funding will be enough to provide some "breathing space" and to "protect" current services but little else.
It is up to councils to decide how much they spend on care, so it is impossible to say just how much will end up going on these services in 2020-21.
In theory, other spending priorities may mean care spending will not go up by quite as much as £1.5bn - although, that seems unlikely given the rest of the funding councils receive, for all services, is going up by £2bn to nearly £50bn, according to the Treasury.
For a sector that has had to bear a heavy burden of the cuts made since 2010, all of this has come as a welcome relief.
But the biggest challenge for the government is still to be tackled - how to reform the system of funding.
Currently, only about a fifth of older people who need care receive it from the state, with the rest having to go without, rely on friends and family or pay for it themselves.
The chancellor promised plans would be published in due course. But the problem is the government has been saying that for the past two years.
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A contractor has died after an accident at an Ikea store.
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Emergency services were called to the Swedish furniture shop in Reading at 02:30 BST.
The site, which opened in July, will remain closed while police investigate the circumstances of the man's death. No arrests have been made.
Javier Quinones, the firm's deputy retail manager for the UK and Ireland, said safety and security was Ikea's highest priority.
"Our thoughts are with the individual's family at this time," he added.
Thames Valley Police confirmed it was investigating a "workplace accident".
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India's government has asked messaging service WhatsApp to act urgently to halt the spread of "irresponsible and explosive messages" on its platform after a spate of deadly attacks. But will it have any effect, asks the BBC's Ayeshea Perera.
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What messages are being sent?
The statement comes amid a spate of mob lynchings that have killed at least 17 people across India in the last three months. Media reports put the number of dead higher.
The violence has been blamed on rumours of child kidnappings, spread over WhatsApp, which have led people to attack strangers.
Police say it is proving hard to get people to believe that the messages are false.
In one of the most recent lynchings, in the north-eastern state of Tripura, the victim was a man employed by local government officials to go around villages with a loudspeaker, asking locals not to believe the rumours being spread on social media.
The Indian government said the company cannot evade "accountability and responsibility" for the content its users are sharing.
Why is the situation out of control?
The spate of attacks is increasingly alarming and shows no sign of abating.
India's telecom regulatory commission says there are more than one billion active mobile phone connections in India, and millions of Indians have started getting online in a very short space of time.
For the vast majority of them, their first point of contact to the internet is through their mobile phone.
"Suddenly people from rural areas in particular are inundated with information and are unable to distinguish what is real from what is not. They tend to believe whatever is sent to them," Pratik Sinha, the founder of fact-checking website Alt news, told the BBC in an earlier interview.
With an estimated 200 million users, India is WhatsApp's biggest market. It is also the single largest internet-based service available to people in the country. This means it has tremendous reach, allowing not only messages to spread exponentially, but also enabling mobs to gather quickly.
Because it is primarily a personal messaging app, people are more inclined to believe information they receive through it, because it comes to them via family and friends. Therefore, the inclination to double check is very low.
This is only going to get worse when India adds its next 300 million internet users in the next three years, technology analyst Prasanto K Roy told the BBC. They will be non-English speakers, and most will be lower down the socio-economic pyramid with lower levels of literacy, he says. They will consume mostly video and music.
"Video is the easiest of platforms for fake news. It's so easy to misrepresent: just find any old video of a fight or a brutal killing on the internet, describe it as something recent and inflammatory, and send it out. In minutes, it goes viral, racing around on Facebook and WhatsApp."
And the technology it uses has made the situation even more complicated.
WhatsApp is encrypted end to end, at the smartphone itself, and messages are not stored on WhatsApp's servers.
The company itself says this: "Only you and the person you're communicating with can read what's sent - and nobody in between, not even WhatsApp" and "WhatsApp does not store messages once they are delivered or transaction logs of such delivered messages"."However, some metadata (such as who called or texted whom) is stored, and has been reportedly shared with US federal law enforcement after court orders," says Mr Roy.
The fact that the service employs end-to-end encryption means it differs from services like China's WeChat, which has to comply with Chinese law that enables the state to monitor messages. It is more similar in nature to apps like Signal or Telegram, but those are not used by many people in India.
The government seems to be out of its depth. Law and order officials apparently are at a loss over how to deal with messages going viral on WhatsApp, and or how to engage with technology companies to get them to do something.
What has WhatsApp said?
The company has told the government that it is also "horrified by these terrible acts of violence", calling the situation a "challenge that requires government, civil society and technology companies to work together".
While it has declined to make changes to the way it encrypts messages because "the way people use the app is by nature still very private", it has outlined several steps it is taking to help address the problem.
This includes enabling users to leave groups and block people more easily. WhatsApp is also planning to run long-term public safety ad campaigns in India, the statement said, adding it had already tied up with local organisations to help dispel rumours being spread on its platform.
The company also said it planned to start an engagement programme with law enforcement officials, helping them share best practice for how WhatsApp is used by local police as a resource for their community.
It is also labelling messages that have been forwarded from somewhere else. But Mr Roy says this does not show you how much a message has been forwarded.
Should WhatsApp do more?
That depends on who you talk to.
Nikhil Pahwa, the founder and editor of the Medianama website, says WhatsApp needs to evolve to help stop the problem.
"Of course platforms like WhatsApp are enablers of free speech and should not be censored. But that doesn't mean they don't have a responsibility in situations like this," he told the BBC.
Mr Pahwa says there are several practical measures the platform can use.
"For instance, all messages should be treated as private. This means that people will no longer have the ability to copy-paste or forward messages. Anything that is forwarded will need to be made public and this could generate a message ID that can then be tracked," he said.
His other suggestions include enabling users to flag objectionable content and making first-time users watch a mandatory video that explains how the platform works.
Mr Roy says however, that merely targeting the "messenger", when the biggest disseminators of misinformation on WhatsApp are political parties, is disingenuous.
"This needs to be tackled at the source. Political parties, particularly the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party [BJP] need to take a more disciplined stand about using WhatsApp.
Like a no-first use nuclear policy, maybe the answer is for all political parties to pledge not to use it to spread misinformation," he says.
From a legal standpoint, while a message like this from the government would worry WhatsApp, it is protected under the Indian IT Act's Intermediary Guidelines, which recognises that such platforms are intermediaries and thus cannot be held accountable for content shared on them, with certain conditions.
Mr Roy says that while these guidelines specify a "take down" process for websites to remove objectionable content, it is unclear what needs to be done with encrypted messaging platforms like WhatsApp, where traditional "takedowns" are not easy to implement.
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Hundreds of people marched from Salford to Manchester in a May Day protest against spending cuts backed by the city's new elected mayor Ian Stewart.
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They marked International Workers Day by starting from Bexley Square, where unemployed people protested in 1931.
They were addressed by Mr Stewart, former Labour MP for Eccles.
"I will work with the Labour movement, employers, the voluntary sector and anybody else to mitigate the worst effects of those cuts," he said.
The Salford marchers joined up with trade unionists and groups opposing government spending cuts including Manchester Coalition Against Cuts and Greater Manchester Against The Cuts.
They gathered for a bigger rally at Manchester Cathedral Gardens, which was addressed by Fire Brigades Union General Secretary Matt Wrack.
The rally was organised by Manchester, Salford, Bury and Oldham Trades Councils.
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In a dusty courtyard, behind a tall mesh fence, a group of teenagers are playing a frenetic game of football, while others stand around watching from the sidelines.
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By Secunder KermaniBBC News, Kabul
These are some of Afghanistan's most vulnerable and most troubled children. Inmates of Kabul's Juvenile Rehabilitation Centre.
A small, excited crowd of boys press their faces up to the fence to talk to us.
"Some of us killed people… some of us are thieves," one lanky teenager tells me when I ask what they are accused of.
They're smiling and laughing but they aren't the most serious cases here. The centre generally holds approximately 300 inmates, aged between 12 and 18. On average, around half are accused of being in militant groups: the Islamic State (IS) or the Taliban.
The Taliban control or contest around half of Afghanistan, they've been waging a deadly war against the Afghan government and US-led international forces since being overthrown in 2001.
The staff try and keep the categories of detainees separate, to avoid fights between those linked to the Taliban and to the Islamic State group - which have clashed with each other in the outside world - and to prevent the boys accused of "general crimes" from becoming radicalised.
The boys talking to me in the courtyard all live on the ground floor of the bright green accommodation block. The Taliban and IS members are held in the two floors above them.
"They're terrorists, we are not," says one dismissively.
'Kill to survive'
The BBC was given rare access to the centre, surrounded by high concrete walls, with watchtowers and armed guards dotted around the periphery. In a quiet corner, a social worker introduces us to three alleged IS members. The group is newer, and far less powerful in Afghanistan than the Taliban, but has been responsible for dozens of deadly suicide bombings.
One, wearing an electric blue salwar kameez, and with a glare in his eyes, claims he was wrongly arrested. Many of the boys in the centre are wary about revealing their past activities, even though we are keeping their identities anonymous. Nevertheless, he gradually opens up about his extreme views.
"The foreigners haven't done anything wrong to me, but the Prophet has said jihad against them must continue until the Day of Judgement."
The extent of his radicalisation becomes even clearer as he explains why he hates the Afghan government - allied to US-led international forces.
"This is an Islamic country, but look at Kabul, it's full of brothels. There is so much adultery and homosexuality. There are musicians and, god forbid, there are even people having sex with their own mothers and sisters."
He's from a province in the east of the country, and his description of the Afghan capital Kabul as a pit of debauchery bears no resemblance to reality. Yet it's clear it's something he deeply believes.
At the same time, there's a softer side to him too. Despite only having the beginnings of a beard growing on his face, he's a father to a one-year-old girl.
"I don't want her to see me here, she will cry," he says.
As the interview ends and we walk off, we pass the cells of the accommodation block. In one, a group of boys are dangling their legs out between the blue metal bars of the window, singing a song and hammering out a beat on a small plastic jug.
They giggle as they tell me the song is about "love", but I notice many of them have tattoos scratched onto their wrists, arms or ankles.
Some are crude images of guns or daggers, one - in Persian - reads "have a bad life, and an even worse future"; another, "kill to survive".
Kabul suffers from high levels of crime, with kidnappings and violent robberies common. Unemployment amongst young people is at more than 30% according to the World Bank.
"Kill to survive?" I ask. "Is that what you feel life is like?"
The mood has momentarily grown more serious.
"If you work as a labourer you only earn 200 Afghani (£2) a day, how can you feed your family?" one asks. "You have to steal and rob."
Then, another strikes up his song again, and we leave them giggling in their cell.
'I will join the Taliban again'
The following day, we meet a dizzying stream of boys, an IS recruit who joined up after seeing their propaganda on social media, a 17-year-old Taliban fighter who smilingly asserts that he has killed "lots" of American soldiers - a claim that's almost definitely not true.
One of the boys that stands out is Zakir, a tall, gangly 14-year-old. He looks like a rather dopey teenager, whose deep voice seems too old for his youthful face. But he's proud of his links to the Taliban.
"My job was to plant explosives," he tells me. "The Taliban used to come to the village at night time and I would give them reports about what was going on."
Zakir says he joined the group after seeing "how they prayed and looked after people" when visiting relatives in areas under their control, and watching Taliban propaganda videos.
He tells me he joined "secretly" and that his family never knew. In fact, his father and elder brother were fighting on the other side of the conflict, as members of the Afghan intelligence services.
Was he never worried the explosives he planted could end up killing his own father? He insisted he operated in areas his father never visited, targeting instead local pro government militias who he accused of "raping and stealing".
Zakir, like many of the boys, seemed to have a good relationship with the staff at the centre. But he was clear that he wanted to join the Taliban again.
"Here, we pray five times a day, and have lessons. But when I'm free I will look after my parents, and then I will join the Taliban again. They are fighting for the truth."
Some of his words sounded as if they were copied from propaganda videos. But there were also glimpses of how child-like he was.
What would he do if his parents forbade him from rejoining the Taliban?
"Then I won't… but when they die, I will."
Fighting back
The staff try to deradicalise the boys. There's a school in the centre, with lessons taking place behind thick metal doors, in what used to be cells.
One of the most popular subjects is Islamic studies.
Mubashir Nazari is a heavy set man, with a cropped beard. He's leading a class of around 25 boys - many accused of being in the Taliban or IS - who are reciting Quranic verses.
He admits it's not easy to change their minds, but says the lessons do make a difference.
"When they first come to the centre, and they hear that there's been a suicide attack in Kabul, they are happy and say, 'do you see how many people we have killed? This is jihad'.
"Then we ask them, 'what is the sin of those children killed in the blast? Or the people just going to work?'. And we say, 'where in Islam does it permit you to kill innocent people?'. By the end, when they hear of a suicide attack they get upset."
There are also lessons in academic subjects, with basic literacy taught for those who have never been to school before.
Abdullah, a slim 16-year-old, with bright eyes, and a small traditional cap perched atop his head, tells me he spent two months with the Taliban, and was arrested on his way to a shootout between the group and security forces in western Afghanistan.
He was inspired to sign up when he and his friends began attending a madrassa, or religious school, in his area, which was under the control of the Taliban.
"The preacher said it's your duty to fight and die in the name of Allah," he says.
But now, Abdullah is one of the centre's best students, despite having little to no formal education in the past.
"I'm in Class 10, and waiting for my results so I can move into Class 11," he says with pride. "The Taliban just put ammunition in your hand and tell you to fight, but when I am released from here I want to keep studying."
Traumatised
For staff trying to form relationships with boys like Abdullah, one of the biggest problems is the high turn-over in inmates.
Detainees are regularly released or transferred, whilst there's a constant stream of fresh arrivals.
One morning, we watch as the intelligence services drop off a small boy, his head shaved, wrists still in handcuffs.
He looks extremely nervous as he's taken to the medical centre to be registered. In an almost inaudible voice, he tells them he's suffering from psychological problems.
The doctor taking down his details says mental health issues are common.
He tells me he often sees boys who have self harmed, cutting their bodies or faces.
"Every week there's two or three cases…. They do it with whatever they can find - pieces of glass or metal."
"I think almost all of them have gone through something traumatic and haven't had the ability to process it, so their response to it is fighting," Lyla Schwartz, a foreign psychologist with the Etidal Foundation, explains. "Finding something to be a part of in order to get their anger and frustration out, instead of actually acknowledge how much loss they've experienced."
Ms Schwartz tries to get the boys to address their underlying trauma, but she's stretched for time.
"We always address the crises first - suicide attempts, fighting, riots - but there are some kids that we really have built relationships with. If we had the support and resources, we could go more in depth."
'Killing children'
Fourteen-year-old Mohammad looks particularly nervous
He led a small group of friends running away from an IS camp they were forced into, and is worried about other boys - with extremist views - overhearing us.
His parents both died, and he ended up in the care of his sister and his brother-in-law. The brother-in-law joined IS, and took Mohammad with him to the group's stronghold in the east of Afghanistan.
There, he enrolled him in a madrassa.
"They pretend to be good Muslims," he says, "but they are not doing good things."
"Like what?" I ask.
"Killing children," he replies. It's not clear what he witnessed himself, and what he's simply heard about - he doesn't want to go into details - but later in the conversation, he again refers to IS "killing kids".
Mohammed says he tried to run away with a handful of others. "But we were arrested by IS and put in jail… They beat us and said, 'you want to join the infidels'."
When they could, they tried to escape again.
"We knew if we were discovered we would be killed… We walked all night through the hills and the next day we handed ourselves in."
But while Mohammad is relieved he's no longer in the madrassa, he's frustrated that he's being kept in the detention centre. "We thought we would go home, but instead they put us here."
'My father was wrong'
Aside from lessons in the morning, and a short period in the courtyard, the boys spend their days in their rooms.
Zakir, the 14-year-old Taliban member, shares his cell with nine others, all accused of being in the militant group.
Their favourite pastime? Beadwork.
Zakir shows me a tiny pair of sandals he's made for his younger sister, using red and white beads that are stuck together, others have decorated pens or made prayer beads for their parents.
I use the opportunity to ask Zakir more about life growing up in a warzone.
"I've been seeing dead bodies ever since I can remember," he tells me in a flat tone.
One episode stands out for him. When he was eight, one of his friends was killed by his own parents, for getting involved with local criminals. It's a reminder that the violence in Afghanistan isn't just restricted to the war.
How and why Zakir ended up joining the Taliban is confusing.
His father, whilst working for the intelligence services, was injured in an attack by the group when Zakir was 13. He remembers his parents trying to hide the fact from him. "My father said he was bitten by a dog, but later on I found out that wasn't true."
But despite what happened to his father, Zakir says he began to support the Taliban. "I knew my father was in the wrong, for supporting the foreigners," he tells me.
One of the main reasons he joined the group, he says, was because he was being harassed by local pro-government militia forces.
"If you are dressed like a religious Muslim with a skullcap, they arrest you, beat you and humiliate you."
Once with the Taliban, he felt "safer".
"Before joining the Taliban, I would get upset when I was beaten and ask why is this happening to me? But when I was with the Taliban, it was better, because at least then there was reason - we were enemies."
It's hard to know if all that is true, but Zakir seems genuine. He's conflicted about what he wants to do with his future. He's "proud" of his time with the Taliban, but adds: "Perhaps I won't do it again, as there are other fighters… I want to continue my jihad, but not if my parents are unhappy."
The centre does try and prepare the boys for life on the outside - there's a tailoring workshop for example.
But once they've been released there's no system for checking up on them.
It's a source of frustration for Ms Schwartz.
"There are supposed to be social workers who follow up with them," she says, but security concerns make it difficult for that to happen. "Support, school, jobs, alternatives to what they've come from, is extremely lacking."
Justice Minister Abdul Baseer Anwar - who ultimately has control of the centre - recognises the need to rehabilitate the boys. "The psychologists," he says, "are even more important than the clerics" in fighting against the "brainwashing" done by militants.
Mr Anwar adds that he's looking at introducing new regulations that would make it easier to help find the detainees stable jobs after release. He hopes the international community can help both with more funding and expertise.
'I'll slit your throat'
Abdullah, the former Taliban member who has excelled in his studies, is due for release and worries about what will happen next.
"I won't go back to my village," he tells me. "The Taliban would kill me."
But others in the centre show little sign of changing their views. On our final day, one peering out of the window of his cell on the third floor, points to me and runs his fingers across his neck.
"I'll slit your throat," he shouts down.
It's a reminder of the challenges faced by the Afghan authorities in reintegrating those with extremist views into the rest of society.
The Taliban and US signed an agreement in February aimed at beginning to bring an end to the conflict. In the next stage of the peace process, talks between the insurgents and the government about the future of the country are due to begin, though fighting between them continues.
The boys in the centre linked to the Taliban celebrated the deal as a victory, staying awake late at night offering special prayers. Many hope now to eventually be released as part of a prisoner exchange that belatedly began earlier this month, although both sides have accused each other of not fully abiding by its terms.
Zakir, with a mixture of stubbornness and innocence, insists that the war in Afghanistan will end when American troops leave as Afghans are all "brothers". But he acknowledges he wants the Taliban's interpretation of an Islamic state established in the country, despite the fact many other Afghans clearly don't. Other boys I speak to make clear they believe their "jihad" will continue until sharia law is established.
When we ask Zakir what he thinks about democracy, he's instantly dismissive.
"Nonsense," he replies.
All the teenagers' names have been changed
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A former spokesman for Tamil Tiger rebels who surrendered to the Sri Lankan army has accused the rebels of shooting dead at
least two-hundred civilians who were attempting to flee the war zone.
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Velayutham Dayanidhi, better known as Daya Master, said the rebels were holding civilians as hostages and forcibly recruiting
children as young as thirteen years of age.
He made these allegations in a video interview released by the Sri Lankan defence ministry.
It is not clear whether the interview was conducted under duress.
The United Nations has said there were credible reports that the rebels were preventing civilians from leaving the war zone
and shooting at those who were attempting to flee.
The army says Daya Master and George Master arrived at the army defence line at Puthumathalan a week ago along with family
members. It says they were in "in the company of fleeing civilians".
Sri Lankan military spokesman Brig Udaya Nanayakkara said Daya Master was the most senior rebel official to surrender so far.
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A homeless man has died in Belfast city centre.
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He was found at a shop front on High Street on Wednesday evening.
It is believed he was aged in his 40s. Paramedics and police were called to the scene.
Sandra Moore, director of the Welcome Organisation which works with homeless people in Belfast, has called for greater co-ordination between homeless charities.
"There is very good inter-agency working between the statutory agencies and most of the voluntary sector," she said.
"Our outreach is on the street 17 hours a day and what would help would be co-ordination of the other groups that are out there.
"My intelligence would tell me there are more volunteer groups on the street doing uncoordinated work than there are rough sleepers. That's the distinction we have to make, the difference between people who are homeless but are in temporary accommodation and those who are rough sleepers."
Ms Moore said "an intensive package of support" had been available to the man who was found dead on Wednesday evening.
"We did know this gentleman and gentleman is the proper word in this case," she said.
"While this person has been labelled homeless he actually wasn't roofless, like some of the others who passed over in the last month he did have a bed, somewhere to go at night.
"I don't know the cause of death in this instance, but I do know there were significant underlying health issues.
"So many of the people who come to us do have a complex range of issues and as in this case there was an intensive package of support available to this gentleman."
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Earlier on Friday we reported that a boss of an NHS trust had contacted the BBC with concerns about the provision of gowns for staff during the coronavirus crisis.
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He had asked the BBC for the phone numbers of Burberry and Barbour - two companies which have become involved in making gowns - because he was concerned about supply shortages.
We should clarify that the person concerned is not the boss of an NHS trust but is part of a network of organisations helping to source personal protective equipment for some NHS trusts.
The mistake was caused by a misunderstanding of the person's role in the fight against the pandemic.
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Whatever plot the US eavesdroppers overheard the top two al-Qaeda leaders discussing clearly rattled the US intelligence community so badly that Washington shut 19 of its diplomatic missions around the Middle East, Asia and Africa.
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By Frank GardnerBBC security correspondent
In the Yemeni capital, Sanaa, where the threat of attack is considered greatest, the UK, France and Germany have also shut their embassies.
The British embassy has emptied completely, with all remaining British staff leaving the country on Tuesday, while the US air force flew out American personnel.
So just what is it about al-Qaeda's branch in Yemen that triggers such warning bells in Washington?
Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), al-Qaeda's branch in Yemen, is not the biggest offshoot of the late Osama Bin Laden's organisation, nor is it necessarily the most active - there are other, noisier jihadist cells sprawled across Syria and Iraq, engaged in almost daily conflict with fellow Muslims.
But Washington considers AQAP to be by far the most dangerous to the West because it has both technical skills and global reach.
Plus it is loyal to the nominal al-Qaeda leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and what remains of the group's core leadership hiding in Pakistan.
For the West, AQAP presents three dangers:
AQAP has form. In August 2009, its master bomb-maker Ibrahim al-Asiri, a Saudi national, built an explosive device so hard to detect it was either packed flat next to the wearer's groin or perhaps even concealed inside his body.
He then sent his brother Abdullah, a willing volunteer, as a human bomb to blow up the Saudi prince in charge of counter-terrorism. He very nearly succeeded.
Pretending he wanted to give himself up, Abdullah al-Asiri fooled Saudi security into letting him get right next to Prince Mohammed Bin Nayef before the device was detonated, possibly remotely by mobile phone.
The blast blew the bomber in half, but with most of the explosive force directed downwards, the prince had a miraculous escape with only a damaged hand. AQAP boasted that it would try again and it did.
In December 2009, Ibrahim al-Asiri devised another device to put on a volunteer, this time a young Nigerian called Omar Farouk Abdulmutallab.
He was able to fly all the way from Europe to Detroit with a viable explosive device hidden in his underpants, a massive failure of intelligence and security.
But when he tried to light it as the plane approached Detroit airport, he was spotted, overpowered, arrested and convicted of the attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction.
As Western intelligence heads scrambled to assess this new development, the British government decided to raise the UK national terror threat level to "critical", its highest ever. (It has since dropped back down to "substantial", the third highest of five.)
Drone attacks
The next year, 2010, AQAP tried again, smuggling bombs onto the cargo holds of planes hidden inside printer ink toner cartridges.
The intended destination was America and one device got as far as the UK's East Midlands airport. The plot was thwarted at the last minute by a tip-off from a Saudi informer inside AQAP, but the group has promised to keep trying.
Since then AQAP's leaders have come under continual attack from unmanned US Reaper drones or UAVs, losing several top operatives, including their deputy leader, Saeed al-Shihri, and the influential English-speaking propagandists Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan.
According to the US think-tank the New America Foundation, US drone strikes in Yemen have soared, from 18 in 2011 to 53 in 2012.
A drone strike on Tuesday reportedly hit a car carrying four al-Qaeda operatives.
In Yemen, the US drones are deeply unpopular, sometimes hitting the wrong targets and wiping out whole extended families.
Human rights groups have branded them as a form of extra-judicial killing. Local tribes also view them as an insulting infringement of national sovereignty.
But US and Yemeni officials argue that in the wilder, more remote parts of the country, including Shabwa, Marib and Abyan provinces, targeting from the air based on tip-offs on the ground is their only means of stopping those plotting fresh attacks.
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Two teenage boys have been stabbed in the centre of Cambridge.
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Police were called after "reports of violence" in Sidney Street, at about 19:40 BST on Sunday.
Two boys, aged 13 and 16, were treated in hospital for serious injuries but have since been released, Cambridgeshire Police said.
Two 15-year-old boys have been arrested on suspicion of assault causing grievous bodily harm and remain in custody.
The Labour MP for Cambridge, Daniel Zeichner, described the stabbings as "shocking".
"It is not something that is common in Cambridge and I hope that it remains that way," he said.
"The growing trends in knife and violent crime is a real concern for communities across the country."
He added he was "confident" police were doing their best "to meet growing and new challenges".
Investigators are appealing for witnesses to the incident.
Related Internet Links
Cambridgeshire Police
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If record companies had their way, the internet would never have been invented. For much of the second half of the 20th Century, music fans who wanted to listen to the latest release from their favourite artist had to make a trip to their local record store to buy an album or single on vinyl, cassette or CD.
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By Chris JohnstonBusiness reporter, BBC News
However, the mass adoption of broadband in the developed world at the start of the last decade soon destroyed what was a very cosy - and highly profitable - business model.
A generation has grown up illegally downloading music - and many music fans are content to use advertising-funded websites such as YouTube to hear almost any track you can think of.
In 1999 the global recorded music industry raked in $26.6bn - buoyed mostly by sales of highly profitable CDs. But as pirating took off the total slipped to less than $20bn in 2007 and last year was down to just under $15bn, according to industry body IFPI.
The arrival of Apple's iTunes music download store in 2003 made it much easier to legally buy music online, but its growth has stalled as more music fans switch to streaming services such as Spotify.
The transition is similar to the way that many consumers now rent movies online or through subscription services such as Sky or Netflix rather than buying a DVD.
Spotify's jukebox-like service lets users play millions of songs for free with ads in between, or pay £4.99/$4.99 a month without those annoying interruptions.
Since starting in 2006, the Swedish company now has 20 million paying subscribers and another 55 million using its free service. Aware of which way the wind is blowing, Apple this week joins the streaming bandwagon with the launch of Apple Music.
It will offer users a three-month free trial, after which it will cost the same as market leader Spotify, but with no free tier.
Apple Music will have a crucial advantage over the likes of competitors such as Spotify: it will be pre-loaded on the hundreds of millions of iPhones and iPads being used globally via a software update.
That saves Apple from having to do much marketing to promote the service, says Andrew Sheehy, lead analyst at Generator Research.
Exclusives
Rather than aiming to make a profit from music, he says Apple's main aim is to give iPhone users another reason to keep buying its highly profitable devices.
However, the company will use its might in the music business to persuade some big artists to offer some exclusive content - with Pharrell Williams being the first.
His latest song, Freedom, will only be available on Apple Music. Similarly, Taylor Swift will make her music available on the service after pulling it from Spotify last year.
There is no question that Apple's move into streaming will make life much harder for the likes of Spotify.
Mr Sheehy predicts that up to 25% of Apple users will pay for Apple Music after the trial ends. "The competitive dynamics are very lopsided - it's not a level playing field, but that's not to say that Spotify cannot be a success," he says.
Tim Ingham, editor of website Music Business Worldwide, says Apple is aiming to have at least 100 million subscribers after the three-month free trial ends.
He argues Apple Music should be welcomed because it will "help remind people how exciting and integral to their lives music is", adding: "Apple's potential is far, far greater than what Spotify has achieved so far. Hopefully it will bring the glory days back to music."
What is Apple's offer?
Mark Savage, Entertainment reporter, BBC News
The new Music app has that recognisable Apple sheen - bright, colourful and slick, with much less reliance on text than its predecessor.
If you've used iTunes before, it trawls your purchase history to suggest your favourite genres or artists, which swarm onto the screen in a cloud of "bubbles". You simply tap one to highlight a favourite, or hold it down to "burst" it.
Those decisions power the new "for you" tab - which suggests music and curated playlists from iTunes' vast library (the playlists we saw ranged from "chilling out" to "breaking up"). Subscribers can stream the songs and videos they like, or download them for offline use.
Elsewhere, you can browse new releases and top 10 charts, listen to Zane Lowe's new radio show, or even stream the BBC World Service.
What the service lacks is a coherent social element. At launch, there are no collaborative playlists - one of Spotify's most popular features - and the "connect" feature, which provides status updates from your favourite artists, is no match for Tumblr, Twitter or Facebook.
Apple users will enjoy the seamless integration with their current iTunes library - but with the UK pricing now confirmed to be the same as Spotify others will need more persuasion to switch than the availability of Taylor Swift's album 1989.
The end of Spotify?
Given the enormous marketing power Apple can deploy to promote the new service - perhaps using some of its near-$200bn cash pile to do so - will this be the end for Spotify? Not necessarily.
Mr Ingham believes Spotify can be a "very comfortable number two" after Apple.
Some investors appear to agree. Despite the imminent arrival of Apple Music, Spotify said in June that it had raised $526m (£334m) in new funding and was now valued at $8.5bn (£5.4bn). That's more than household names such as Sainsbury and Royal Mail are worth.
Unsurprisingly, Spotify also thinks it can survive the Apple onslaught. Mark Williamson, its head of artist services, says the company has only just "scratched the surface" after getting people to pay for music again. (To be fair, Apple probably deserves some of that credit for its iTunes store.)
While admitting that streaming "is not an easy business to be in", Mr Williamson adds: "We don't think it's going to be easy, but we're confident we can continue to innovate."
The big challenge for Spotify is continuing to grow if it has any hope of becoming profitable. The company reported a net loss of €162m (£117m) last year - largely because its agreement with record companies and publishers requires it to pay 70% of revenues to performers and writers.
Streaming is a pretty good deal for music fans - given that a monthly subscription costs little more than buying one album.
Sheeran for streaming
Many artists, such as Ms Swift, are less certain - mainly because they get paid far less for having a song played on a streaming service than for selling a CD or an album on iTunes.
Some, like her friend Ed Sheeran, are quite happy to be on Spotify because they believe the exposure helps increase sales of concert tickets. Live music is worth more than sales of recorded music in the UK.
Streaming generated revenue of about $2.2bn last year, or 14.7% of the total, according to analysis of industry figures by MBW. That compares with a 46% share for physical music (that means CDs, with a tiny bit of vinyl on top) worth $6.9bn.
The rest of the pie is accounted for by sales on download sites such as iTunes and royalties generated by the use of music in advertising, films and television.
As Mr Ingham says, streaming is yet to capture the attention of most consumers, who might like music but will only buy a couple of CDs a year.
Given that many so people - especially millennials - seem quite happy to get their music fix from YouTube, Apple might face a bigger battle to get fans paying for music than it anticipates.
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There are calls for the US and Canada to put a woman on a banknote. A similar campaign in the UK successfully convinced the Bank of England to put Jane Austen on the £10 note. But is just one woman per country enough?
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By Elle MetzBBC News Magazine
American bills have portraits of the country's Founding Fathers and former presidents. Chinese notes have Mao Zedong and Indian ones have Mahatma Gandhi, but none of them feature any women. Many other currencies also stick to men, sometimes including a token woman or two.
Now there are calls for the US to put a female on the $20 bill. "The United States needs to show the world that we, too, recognise and value the contributions of women," says Susan Ades Stone, executive director of the campaign group Women On 20s.
"Our money says something about us and what we represent as a society. So if we're all about gender equality and diversity and inclusion, let's walk the walk."
The US currently has seven bills in circulation, all of which feature distinguished, deceased American statesmen.
Women On 20s conducted an online poll and asked people to choose which of 15 historical female leaders they would most like to see on the note.
The candidates included civil rights activist Rosa Parks, birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger, suffragette Susan B Anthony and Harriet Tubman who escaped slavery and went on to lead other slaves to freedom.
More than 200,000 people voted in the first round, and the second round - set to last a few weeks - is currently underway.
Once the final poll closes, the group will petition President Obama to replace Andrew Jackson with the chosen woman.
Many wonder why Jackson - the seventh president of the US - hasn't been removed from the $20 bill already. He is especially unpopular with Native Americans due to his signing and enforcing the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which forced tribes off their land. Thousands of Native Americans died on the journey west - known as the Trail of Tears - from exposure, starvation and disease.
His controversial legacy is one of the reasons why Women On 20s chose to target this particular bill for change.
Meanwhile in Canada, more than 54,000 people have signed a petition to put a woman on a banknote there after the sole female to appear on the country's currency, Therese Casgrain, was replaced in 2011 by an icebreaker ship.
"When we open our wallets and see the faces of four male prime ministers and Queen Elizabeth, the subtle message is that Canadian women aren't worthy of being celebrated," says author and historian Merna Forster who started the Canadian campaign.
"Sexist banknotes are unacceptable in a country that boasts of being a world leader in promoting gender equality… If women are equal to men in Canada, they should be equally represented on our banknotes."
A similar petition was launched in the UK in 2013 after it was announced that Winston Churchill would replace Elizabeth Fry - a social reformer and philanthropist - on the £5 note. More than 36,000 people signed it and convinced the Bank of England to put the author Jane Austen on the £10 note from 2017.
In both the UK and Canada, the Queen's portrait is on many banknotes. But, critics say this doesn't count because she appears as a monarch rather than for her achievements. Plus, she will eventually be replaced by a male heir.
Although the UK petition was a success, campaigners in all three countries - the US, Canada and the UK - have called for only one woman on a note. But is that enough? Should half of all portraits on currencies be of women, better reflecting the makeup of the population?
That's what's happened in Sweden. "We thought it was very important to feature an equal number of men and women," says Susanne Eberstein, the chairman of the General Council at the country's Riksbank. "It was well in line with our aims. It was very natural."
Women appear on three of the banknotes there, although one of those depicted is Mother Sweden. A new line of Swedish notes, to be introduced in 2015 and 2016, will feature three men and three women - actress Greta Garbo, Pippi Longstocking author Astrid Lindgren, and opera singer Birgit Nilsson.
Australia, too, has an equal number of men and women on its banknotes - each one has a male on one side and a woman on the other, apart from one with the Queen on it which has parliamentary buildings on the reverse.
So why isn't Women On 20s petitioning for more than one woman to appear on American dollar bills?
The organisation does believe there should be more women on notes but wanted to be realistic about its initial goal. "We hope this is just the beginning," says Stone.
But if bills should equally represent men and women, shouldn't they also reflect a nation's racial diversity? Again, this isn't usually the case, although there are exceptions. Australia, for example, has five bills in circulation, one of which features David Unaipon, an Aboriginal man. Unaipon was a pioneer for Aboriginal rights as well as a distinguished inventor and writer.
Every US note features a white man, albeit one of the country's presidents or Founding Fathers, even though the US population comprises many races - notably, 13% are black and 17% Hispanic. The US Census Bureau lists seven different races, although Americans no doubt identify with many more ethnic backgrounds.
When the Women On 20s selection committee compiled their list of female candidates, they were conscious of diversity, but they did not set out to fill any particular quota, Stone says. Instead, they focused on the candidates' overall impact and trusted that a diverse group would result from the selection process. It did. The 15 female candidates include African, Asian and Native Americans as well as Caucasians.
"I feel that the money that we have now is very last century," says Stone, adding that the US has changed enormously.
"We're more diverse. We're more inclusive. And the money should reflect that." However, "It would be unrealistic to imagine that we could have a female representative of every ethnic group on the bills," she says. "That's for another campaign."
Perhaps a country can't fully represent the diversity of its population on a handful of notes. Euro bills - tasked with representing a huge span of people, cultures and history - depict stylised images of windows, doorways and bridges. Not even actual monuments, let alone portraits of real people.
So could this be the solution - no portraits at all?
Norway currently has women on two of its five banknotes. "In a society where gender equality is an important value, having both male and female portraits on the banknotes is a matter of course," says Hilde Singsaas, from Norges Bank.
However, Norway will soon be getting rid of both men and women when it introduces a new series of notes which will have a sea theme. The specific designs are not yet finalised but proposed motifs (below) feature ships, water and fish. This wasn't because of difficulty reflecting the diversity of Norway's population through portraits though, Singsaas says.
"All the previous banknote series featured portraits as the primary motif, without any clear connection between them," she explains. "This time, the aim was to find a recurrent theme binding the banknotes together into a coherent whole."
Similarly, Denmark recently introduced a new series of notes featuring bridges and prehistoric objects rather than people. Its previous series of five bills had women on two, men on two and one with a woman and a man. On its website, the Danish National Bank explains that the bridges symbolise links between various parts of Denmark and between the past and present.
Putting bridges instead of people on the notes did not have anything to do with difficulty depicting a diverse population, says the bank's spokesman Lars Luth Mikkelsen.
Another reason it might be easier to choose landscapes or buildings over people is that prominent figures are often controversial in one way or another, like Jackson in the US.
Every person that you put on a banknote will garner some negative and some positive feedback, says Sweden's Eberstein. She and the Riksbank received criticism about the decision to put opera singer Birgit Nilsson on one of Sweden's new notes. Nilsson is pictured singing an opera by Richard Wagner, whose works are sometimes associated with Nazi Germany.
Eberstein pointed out that Nilsson most often performed Wagner, who is still very popular today.
"She was a world famous singer," Eberstein says, "and a good representative of Sweden at that time."
And Women On 20s' Stone admits, "You can never please everyone."
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An upcoming election has highlighted the deep disagreement between native Hawaiians over what the future should look like. For some, it's formal recognition of their community and a changed relationship within the US. Others want to leave the US entirely - or more accurately, want the US to leave Hawai'i.
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By Taylor Kate BrownBBC News Magazine
When US officials came onto the stage that June night, they must have known they would be hearing from a hostile audience.
Speaker after speaker came up to the microphone, decrying a rigged process and an occupying government with no legitimacy.
"We do not need you here. This is our country."
"Get out of our house! Go home."
The officials weren't hearing from foreign nationals, but a crowd of citizens in Honolulu, Hawai'i. Someone began singing the opening words to Hawaii Ponoʻī - a national anthem of the Hawaiian Kingdom and the state's official song.
"Hawaii ponoʻī (Hawaii's own), Nānā i kou moʻī (Be loyal to your king)."
Many in the room at the Hawaiian state capitol began singing along.
This was the first in a series of 2014 hearings by the US interior department about whether it should offer a path to federal recognition to the Native Hawaiian community. Such a path has been long open to Native American groups on the mainland, but not to the descendants of Hawaii's indigenous people.
A year later, the interior department has made it official - publishing a proposed "procedures for re-establishing a formal government-to-government relationship".
The first ballots to elect delegates to a convention, or 'aha, for this purpose have now gone out in Hawai'i. Forty delegates from across the islands will meet in February to discuss whether there should be a Native Hawaiian government and what it should look like in the 21st Century.
But not everyone is happy with the 'aha. Some of those who would be eligible to vote, or become delegates themselves, have said they will boycott it. One delegate candidate has already dropped out, calling the 'aha "not pono" (upright or fair).
Federal recognition has been a wish of some activists for decades, but previous attempts to do so in Congress have failed. A prominent Hawaiian in Washington, however, has moved the process forward.
Barack Obama publicly supported the last attempt to gain the recognition option through Congress. Like other issues that have been stymied in the polarised legislature, the administration has now decided to take action through the executive branch.
But for those who see Obama as their best chance, time is running out - his term ends just over a year from now.
Native American tribal governments are a nation within a nation. Such governments hold their own elections, run police departments, courts and other internal infrastructure on reservation land. American Indians are citizens of their tribe, the US and the state where they live.
But tribal nations are still "domestic dependent nations" and the boundaries of their sovereignty have moved based on court rulings and legislation.
Recognition would define native Hawaiians as a separate political entity - protecting many of the federal programmes currently provided to native Hawaiians, like favourable housing loans, a land trust programme, health care, educational and cultural grants.
It would also allow for an element of economic independence, although one industry that has enriched a few Native American tribes - gambling - is banned in Hawai'i.
But all of this is predicated on the idea the US government is the rightful authority in Hawai'i, something a small but increasing number of Hawaiians no longer believe.
Williamson Chang, a professor of law at University of Hawai'i, is one of those Hawaiians. He argues under international law, one country can only annex another by treaty - a document which both parties sign. This is how the entire rest of the US was formed - the Louisiana Purchase, the treaties with Native American tribes, the addition of the Republic of Texas. Anything else - including what happened in Hawaii - is an occupation, Chang says.
Hawaii occupies a unique place in US history - a set of islands 2,500 miles (4,023km) away from the mainland where in 1893, white businessmen and sympathetic politicians, with help from the US military, overthrew a constitutional monarchy.
The coup leaders hoped to be immediately annexed, but President Grover Cleveland rejected the idea, calling US involvement in the overthrow an "embarrassment".
Three years later, a treaty failed in the Senate after lobbying by the deposed Queen Liliuokalani as well as tens of thousands of petitions from Hawaiians opposing the move.
But the next year, with fighting in the Pacific during the Spanish-American war and a new president in office, Congress passed a joint resolution annexing Hawai'i. US military might and a welcoming government in the Republic of Hawaii helped complete the process.
But if countries could be simply annexed by another's legislature, Chang says, "Hawai'i by its legislature could declare the United States was part of it."
While the US has formally apologised for their role in the overthrow of the Kingdom - a 1993 Congressional resolution admitted as much - there's been no word from the US government about whether the annexation was legal.
"There are definitely flaws in the way in which Hawaii and its lands were transferred to the US," Melody Kapilialoha Mackenzie, a professor of law at the University of Hawaii, says.
"But for me, the question is - where do you take those claims - is there any forum in which that voice can be heard?"
In 2000, David Keanu Sai brought a case concerning Hawaiian sovereignty to the Permanent Court of Arbitration in the Netherlands. The court agreed to hear the case but ultimately made no ruling, saying it could not even consider the issue because "the United States of America is not a party to the proceedings and has not consented to them".
Sai is also among those who believe that race or ancestry has no place in a Hawaiian bid to be free of the US. The Hawaiian Kingdom was a multi-ethnic government, and that's how it should remain, he says, something that wouldn't happen under federal recognition.
What everyone can agree on is the hurt done to Native Hawaiians.
Peter Apo says he spent almost half of his 75 years "not knowing who the hell I was".
"The only thing I knew about Hawaiians was what I saw in television and the tourism ads," he says. He's now one of the trustees of the Office of Hawaiian Affairs, a state agency.
By the time of the overthrow in 1893, the Hawaiian population had gone from at least 400,000 to less than 40,000 people - all in the space of a century, in part because of diseases introduced into the islands. After annexation, students were not allowed to speak Hawaiian in school, and the language almost died out as a result.
Kahoolawe, an island considered spiritually important to Hawaiians, was used as test-bombing site by the US army until the 1990s. Unexploded ordnance still remains on the island even after a clean-up attempt.
And today, many health indicators for Native Hawaiians are the worst of all the ethnic groups in Hawai'i.
"I think for many native Hawaiians… it's not like something that happened way in the past," Mackenzie says.
McGregor says the previous generation of Hawaiian activists struggled for the cultural and political gains Native Hawaiians have managed so far and younger Hawaiians take it for granted. She thinks federal recognition is needed.
"It was fought for and it can be lost," she says.
Joshua Lanakila Managuil, a young activist who is running for a seat on the 'aha, says he's lucky to be the product of a Native Hawaiian cultural and political renaissance, but he's worried about the ramifications of federal recognition. He points to the uneven and largely difficult situation of Native Americans.
"That is not a model for me that is going to secure our safety," he says. "We need to acknowledge what was done and remedy those things instead of slapping on a [plaster]."
Apo has written a number of editorials calling for a native Hawaiian government for the purposes of federal recognition.
He suggests such a government could "carve out a duty free port of call", and be able to do business with other nations. "That would be huge...that would be an opportunity that would benefit all Hawaiians," even non-native ones.
But Apo says he can see where the opposition is coming from.
"I guess part of the sentiment is why would you want to deal with the very people who did you in?"
While pro-independence Hawaiians dominated the microphones during interior department's hearings over the summer, the breakdown of the written comments was different.
Chang estimates about 60% of those comments were in favour of federal recognition, and he suspects that percentage translates to the larger Hawaiian population.
"I would say the majority of Hawaiians don't agree with sovereignty and independence - either they don't know their history or they think it's way too late to separate from the US," he says. "It's an uphill battle for the sovereignty groups."
And it is a battle that now has a timetable.
The 'aha is going forward after a federal judge ruled the organisation running the election, Na'i Aupuni, was sufficiently independent of the Office of Hawaiian Affairs to make it a private election, despite receiving funds from the agency through an intermediary.
Once elected, delegates will meet for 40 days and end in April.
There is division within the independence movement whether to engage with the 'aha at all, says Managuil.
"Truly in legal terms - under kingdom laws - technically this is an act of treason," he says. "But right now our kingdom isn't in any place to be calling the shots."
He and others "are putting ourselves into the mix in order to protect the rights of our people," Managuil says.
Despite Na'i Aupuni's reassurances, pro-independence Hawaiians feel that the 'aha is simply a vehicle to push federal recognition.
"People are acting out of fear," Managuil says. "Either route, I think, demands more time."
Apo has a clear preference, but whatever happens, he says, "at least it will be something that Hawaiians decided. Self-determination".
"I think if we're able to get to at least to the government-to-government relationship - the stage where we're actually negotiating - that would cap the 123 years with a good ending to the story and a great future for Hawaiians in being able to maintain their identity as a people," Apo says.
"If that doesn't happen this is never going to stop."
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The SNP have regained overall control of Dundee City Council after winning a by-election called after the death of a Labour councillor.
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Steven Rome, 32, a Dundee University graduate, was returned as the new councillor for the North East ward.
Mr Rome received 1,507 first preference votes with Labour candidate Jim Malone receiving 1,224 first preference votes.
Turnout in the election, which was called following the death of Brian Gordon in February, was 28.4%.
The SNP now hold 15 of the council's 29 seats.
The party previously lost overall control of the authority in 2017, but formed an administration with support from independent councillor Ian Borthwick.
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What happens to shop workers after the shutters are pulled down for the last time and the lights are switched off as another store closes?
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By Sean CoughlanBBC News
What was once a bustling shop and a way of life for its workers is now left to a bunch of mannequins in darkness.
"It was just strange. It didn't feel real, locking the doors and saying goodbye and just thinking I'm never ever going to be here again," says Tamsin Lynham, who worked at the now closed Topshop in west London's Westfield shopping centre.
For the last week, when they were clearing out the shop, she says she cried every night on the way home on the Tube.
"It's the first time something like this has happened to me. I went into absolute panic mode. It wasn't really just a job, it was like you've got a little extended family. It was a huge part of my life," she says.
Tamsin is 35 and has been working in shops for more than half her life, starting at Topshop with a Saturday job when she was 16. The closure, she says, has been "heartbreaking".
Like so many people whose jobs have been threatened in the pandemic, Tamsin is standing nervously at a crossroads.
What happens next? Where will all the shop workers go if more retail jobs are lost? Who is going to retrain them? The closure of Topshop branches is a business headline, but it's also a piece of people's lives disappearing.
Will it be a case, to use the phrase attributed to football manager Tommy Docherty, that when one door closes… another one slams in your face?
According to Neil Carberry, head of the Recruitment and Employment Confederation, this is the "fastest-changing jobs market for a generation".
Recruiters have seen big collapses in demand in sectors such as retail, hospitality and the leisure industry - and growth in other areas including social care, construction and home delivery. The biggest year-on-year fall has been for bar staff, while demand has soared for bricklayers.
The impact of the pandemic cuts across generations. While mid-career shop workers are worrying about reinventing themselves, young people are struggling to get a first job.
Isabel Scavetta, aged 23 from Maidenhead, in Berkshire, has seen her expectations about jobs turned upside down. But not necessarily for the worst. "In some ways I'm strangely grateful for having to re-evaluate," she says, describing a "complete career pivot".
Isabel is part of Generation Covid, leaving university last summer. Or maybe it would be fairer to say that university left them, because their student days ended with such abruptness.
She has a degree in European social and political studies from University College London, but with so many graduate schemes closed by the pandemic, her direction "radically changed".
She taught herself coding and began volunteering work for an online project called Class of 2020, which provides free training for young graduates trying to get into work.
Her new digital skills have got her a paid internship in artificial intelligence at Rolls Royce, working remotely. "The entire trajectory of my career looks completely different from what I would have thought a year ago," says Isabel.
But she is keenly aware of how tough it has become in the quicksand of the current jobs market. Even knowing where to start can be overwhelming, she says, so that it becomes a kind of "decision fatigue that's almost paralysing".
Deirdre Hughes, careers consultant and former chair of the National Careers Council, says it can feel very confusing for people looking for advice, particularly if they're shell-shocked as a result of a redundancy. "How do you take that first step?" she says.
She argues that there needs to be a public information campaign about where to find job advice - and warns the current system in England is too fragmented and "not good enough".
Tamsin from Topshop, is still trying to readjust to what's happened - and the loss of a job she "really loved". "I would never have seen that coming. I'm still in shock if I'm honest. I never thought there wouldn't be a Topshop on the High Street," says Tamsin.
"It's all I've ever known. I feel like I've been robbed, I had so many big plans. I put everything into that job, I really did."
Her colleague Milly Vaja, aged 27, says it is "mind boggling" to see such shops closing, and is still staggered by what has happened during the pandemic. High Street brands, as "unsinkable" as the Titanic, are disappearing.
Now Tamsin and Milly are facing tough choices. They say their main source of advice has been other people they've worked with.
Redundancy rates are higher now in the pandemic, according to Office for National Statistics figures, than they were in the economic shockwave that followed the financial crash of 2008.
"Do I stay in retail? Do I stick with what I know?" Tamsin is considering whether it would be safer to move into more "high-end fashion".
"I absolutely loved it, but do I look for something else now?" says Milly.
Tamsin might make a complete change of direction and has thought about retraining as a dog groomer. "Where do I start? I haven't been to a careers advice person since I was at school," says Tamsin, who worked her way up to be the store's visual manager.
"A lot of people won't even look at your CV if there's no degree. It closes a lot of doors," she says.
She says other people in retail have retrained as carers, and is upset when she hears about former shop workers having applications turned down as they look for new careers.
"People need a second chance. It's not about whether they tick all the boxes," says Tamsin.
"The interview process is so hard, they make it so difficult. 'You need five years experience.' But how do I get experience if no-one gives you a chance?" says Milly.
She is moving out of London to Leicester, to get an affordable house, but that means finding a secure job for the mortgage.
Milly says she'd booked an interview for packing orders for a delivery firm but decided that wasn't for her, and went back to searching online for other jobs. Her life is suddenly full of uncertainty, and she's not alone.
The recruitment website LinkedIn says it has seen a 24% year-on-year drop in hiring for retail jobs, with jobs in recreation and travel even harder hit, down by 52% compared with January 2020.
The biggest two growth areas for jobs are in healthcare, up 28% year-on-year, and transportation and logistics, up 11%. All those deliveries at the door are a warning bell for a changing jobs market.
Amina Dahir, in Birmingham, is one of those people changing to become a carer. Her job as a cleaner in a shopping mall disappeared in the lockdown.
"It was really hard, but we just had hope that it was going to come back. But it's like there's no more security, if you understand. That's how I felt," says Amina, 40. "So many people have lost their jobs."
But she's got a positive new direction. A work coach at the JobCentre Plus directed her to the care sector and the free training available. She says it will be rewarding to care for old people as well as getting qualifications for a more secure job.
Amina expects it to be even harder after the pandemic, with more people chasing fewer jobs. "When you lose your job you need training. You don't know what happens next. Lots of people don't even know where to look," she says.
Careers week
Across BBC News, as part of National Careers Week, we're hearing from people at a crossroads in their career and will aim to give tips and advice.
As part of the week, BBC 5live's Naga Munchetty will host a careers clinic from 13:15-14:00 GMT on Tuesday 2 March on the BBC News LinkedIn page.
Amina's training, funded by the government, is being carried out by the adult education organisation the WEA, the Workers Educational Association, which has trained 36,000 people during the pandemic.
"It's worrying and frightening for many people at the moment, given the rapid rise in unemployment," says Simon Parkinson, the WEA's chief executive.
"It's hard enough at any stage of your career, but if you've been in a single industry for 15 or 20 years, it's devastating."
He says there can be stress and anxiety that starts "spiralling downwards". The challenge is to turn this round, he says, and show the "world of work has changed massively" - and there are new opportunities.
"It's about raising people's confidence, reminding people it's not too late. They need food on their table. They're the engine room of the economy. It's not the graduate jobs, it's the millions of people, 35- to 55-year-olds, that have worked in some of the backbone sectors of the country."
He says very practical barriers to recruitment are often overlooked - such as everything being online, including Zoom interviews. "It is not true to think that everybody in the country has got a solid broadband connection and access to a laptop."
While Amina was looking for training after losing her cleaning job, across the city Harriet Ferguson was graduating from the University of Birmingham.
"It's hard to know what's available," says the 23-year-old, "and you can't go to careers events to go for an interview and meet people." She been job hunting in the pandemic.
Employment figures in February showed it was her age group that has been hardest hit - with almost three-fifths of job losses falling on the under-25s.
Harriet, from High Wycombe, wanted to work with young people and has got a six-month contract with the St John Ambulance cadet programme.
But she is concerned about other young graduates struggling to find jobs, with worries about loneliness and being "completely in the dark" about what comes next.
She has been volunteering to help other young jobseekers on the Class of 2020 website, and hears about their problems.
"It's so isolating," she says. "The standard story is people sending in hundreds of applications. There's the sense that it's only you that's struggling, trying to be resilient, when it's rejection after rejection after rejection."
Where do you start?
The pandemic has also shown up the vulnerability of those relying on insecure, temporary contracts.
Ritu Panchal worked regularly for years as a teaching assistant, but through an agency. When her work in schools suddenly stopped in the lockdown, she had nothing to replace it.
"I didn't expect to be like this," says the 43-year-old from Hemel Hempstead. "I never missed a day. Wherever they told me to go I went."
Ritu is training for qualifications to improve her chances of getting another teaching assistant job on a more permanent basis. A theme that keeps recurring, for young and old job hunters, is the uncertainty about where to get advice.
There are no shortages of warnings about a "perfect storm" for jobs in the pandemic, but where do you look for the rescue boats?
There are thousands of retraining courses offered online - many of them expensive - but which ones are really going to make a difference?
Amina, part of the wave of people being retrained as carers, says advice should be offered when people are still working, before "waiting for a crisis to come".
There is a wider issue of how much has been invested in adult careers advice, whether it has been taken seriously and how it is delivered.
A probably apocryphal story, suggesting the lack of priority, is that when a senior minister was asked about careers advice, he joked that if careers advisers were so good how had they ended up as careers advisers?
Many retraining schemes are reached through the Job Centre Plus system, including for those in work. Simon Parkinson at the WEA suggests there should be more ways of "connecting with people".
"People don't necessarily want to walk straight into a Job Centre. Particularly older workers, if they managed to come through the 1980s," he says.
There are a growing number of government responses. The National Careers Service has free advice and a helpline, there's a Skills Toolkit to find courses and 16-week "boot camps" teaching specific skills, such as coding and software development.
Starting next month, the government's "lifetime skills guarantee" will include 400 free training courses for adults whose qualifications are below A-levels, in areas such as social care, childcare and construction.
Under the "Plan for Jobs" scheme, there are initiatives such as Kickstart to create new jobs for 16- to 24-year-olds and Restart, which will have £400m in 2021-22 to provide support for the unemployed.
For Tamsin Lynham, her shop is gone but she says she's feeling more positive and getting out her CV. "To be honest, it's been a hard year."
She remembers the moment when they had a last cheer as they shut the shop, and the sadness afterwards.
"You think about all the people you've worked with, it was such a great place to work. I thought to myself: 'How much did these four walls stress me?'
"And people will think we were only selling clothes."
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A US military strike with a weapon known as the "mother of all bombs", or MOAB, killed 36 Islamic State (IS) group militants and destroyed their base, the Afghan defence ministry says.
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The most powerful non-nuclear bomb ever used by the US in combat was dropped on IS tunnels in Nangarhar province.
No civilians were affected by the explosion, the ministry said.
The US military said the bomb was used purely on tactical grounds, "the right weapon against the right target".
A statement on the IS-supporting Amaq news agency denied there were any IS casualties in the bomb strike.
Read more:
How powerful is 'mother of all bombs'?
What will Trump do about Afghanistan?
How successful has IS been in Afghanistan?
Chief Executive of Afghanistan Abdullah Abdullah confirmed that the attack had been carried out in co-ordination with the government and that "great care had been taken to avoid civilian harm".
In a press briefing on Friday, Gen John Nicholson, commander of US forces in Afghanistan, said: "We have US forces at the site and we see no evidence of civilian casualties nor have there been reports."
The Afghan defence ministry said the bomb struck a village area in the Momand valley where IS fighters were using a 300m-long network of caves.
It said the 21,600lb (9,800kg) bomb also destroyed a large stash of weapons.
Presidential spokesman Shah Hussain Murtazawi told the BBC that IS commander Siddiq Yar was among those killed. Mr Murtazawi said the IS fighters in the tunnels had "come from Pakistan and were persecuting people in the local area".
The GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast Bomb was dropped by plane in Achin district on Thursday evening local time, the Pentagon said.
More than 9m (30 ft) in length, it was first tested in 2003 but had not been deployed in combat before.
Gen Nicholson said it was "the right time to use the GBU-43 tactically".
He added: "Let me be clear - we will not relent in our mission to destroy [IS in Afghanistan]... There will be no sanctuary for terrorists in Afghanistan."
Achin district governor Ismail Shinwary told the BBC that Afghan special forces, with the help of American air support, had begun anti-IS operations in the area 13 days ago.
He said IS targets had been bombed regularly but "last night's bombarding was very powerful... the biggest I have ever seen".
Nangarhar Provincial Governor Gulab Mangal said IS fighters had used the complex to "kill people and hold important meetings".
Massive blast area - Jonathan Marcus, BBC defence correspondent
The clue is in the ungainly name - the MOAB or GBU-43/B massive ordnance air blast is the US military's most destructive conventional (that is non-nuclear) bomb.
It is a huge weapon and is GPS-guided. It was dropped from a MC-130 aircraft - the US Special Forces variant of the Hercules transport. The weapon is carried on a special cradle inside the aircraft from which it is extracted by a parachute.
Its principal effect is a massive blast over a huge area. It is a larger version of weapons used during the Vietnam War.
The Trump administration's policy towards Afghanistan remains under consideration but the use of this weapon sends a powerful signal that IS is top of the administration's target list wherever its offshoots may be found.
A member of an anti-IS group in the area who gave his name only as Mohammad told the BBC he was at a checkpoint 1km from the bomb strike.
He said: "We were eating dinner when we heard a big explosion, [I] came out of my room and saw a mountain of fire... the area was full of light with the fire of the bomb."
He said all civilians had left the area since the start of the anti-IS operation.
President Donald Trump called the strike "another successful job".
The BBC's Jill McGivering says it remains unclear what President Trump's Afghan strategy will be - he has talked in the past about the need for the US to get out of nation-building and may be keen to extricate himself from this long-running and expensive conflict.
But, she says, he has also expressed determination to stop the spread of IS.
Former Afghan President Hamid Karzai vehemently condemned the attack, saying on Twitter it was "not the war on terror but the inhuman and most brutal misuse of our country as testing ground for new and dangerous weapons".
Syria error
IS announced the establishment of its Khorasan branch - an old name for Afghanistan and surrounding areas - in January 2015. It was the first time that IS had officially spread outside the Arab world.
It was the first major militant group to directly challenge the Afghan Taliban's dominance over the local insurgency.
However, experts say it has struggled to build a wide political base and the indigenous support it expected. It has steadily lost territory and fighters to US air strikes and an assault by Afghan forces on the ground.
Estimates about IS's numerical strength inside Afghanistan vary, ranging from several hundred to a few thousand fighters. US forces say their number has been cut in half since early 2016 due to military operations.
The MOAB strike followed last week's death of a US special forces soldier fighting IS in Nangarhar.
The news also came hours after the Pentagon admitted an air strike in Syria mistakenly killed 18 rebels.
It said a partnered force had mistakenly identified the target location as an IS position, but the strike on 11 April had killed rebels from the Syrian Democratic Forces, which are backed by Washington.
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Aberdeenshire Council's ruling administration has been dealt a blow with the resignation of councillors, leaving it a minority.
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Independents Martin Kitts-Hayes - the council's deputy leader - and Sheena Lonchay have left the alliance.
They follow Labour's Alison Evison and Raymond Christie, who left earlier in the week.
It means the Conservative-led administration is now a minority, with 33 of the 68 councillors.
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The death of a man killed by a single stab wound could be linked to another stabbing that occurred less than two hours earlier, police said.
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Waryam Hussain, 20, died after being attacked on Bishopscote Road, Luton, at about 16:40 BST on 6 May.
At about 15:00 BST a man sustained serious injuries after he was stabbed in the leg in Dumfries Street, Luton.
Bedfordshire Police said it was "working to establish whether there are any connections" between the incidents.
A 21-year-old man has been charged with wounding with intent and possession of an offensive weapon in a public place in connection with the Dumfries Street attack.
He was remanded in custody after a court appearance.
Officers are appealing for anyone with information about either stabbing to contact them.
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As the internet has developed and social media has grown, people's online identity has shifted increasingly away from their real-life personas. But how has this online influence changed us?
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By David BakerTechnology journalist
In 1993, in the early days of the world wide web, a cartoon appeared in The New Yorker.
It showed a dog, sitting at a computer, turning to another dog and saying: "On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog."
The cartoon by Peter Steiner and one of the magazine's most reproduced ever, captures the thrill of those early days when the internet, then a matter of slow dial-up connections and clunky text-only "bulletin boards", provided a way for people to reengineer their identity online.
Men could pose as women, the young as old, amateurs as experts, country loners as sophisticated urbanites.
Last year, 22 years on, The New Yorker published another cartoon on the subject, drawn by Kaamran Hafeez. This time, two dogs are watching their owner surf the web. The caption: "Remember when, on the internet, nobody knew who you were?"
The internet has had a huge impact on our sense of identity since its explosion into popular use about 25 years ago. It has brought into our lives people, ideas, viewpoints and cultures that, otherwise, we would never have met or heard of.
And that has forced us to reconsider our identities in comparison with theirs. It has allowed us to ally with people with a similar outlook and become part of their group, even if they live thousands of miles away.
And, above all, it has given us a way to re-engineer our identity almost continually and discover what it is like to be someone very different from our "real" selves.
This is not new, of course. Through make-up, clothing, the music we like, the books we read, the opinions we express, the people we vote for, and so on for ever, we have always been busy defining and redefining our identity.
But, before the internet, that busy-ness took place in the small arena of our friends, family and colleagues - and indeed, much of it was about developing separate identities to show to each group.
Now the potential audience for our identity - and so much of identity is about performance - has increased to levels that, a quarter of a century ago, we would have had only if we were a film star or a rock musician.
If we have 300 friends on Facebook and each of them has 300 friends - and many people, of course, have more - that's 90,000 people who are two degrees of separation away.
And even if 90% of those are duplicates (people who are also friends with our friends), that leaves 9,000 people observing our life, Like-ing, or not, our opinions and commenting on our photos.
That's an audience that would have been almost impossible, for someone not working in the arts, politics or the media, to reach in pre-internet times. Now it's commonplace. Is it surprising that many of us spend a huge amount of time managing our online identity?
Not only has the internet given us these vastly bigger audiences for our identity, it has changed the way we understand how other people see us, from a (usually) private and intimate process to a very public scrutiny of who we are.
Through Likes, comments, ratings and so on, we receive almost instantaneous feedback on the adjustments we make to our identity, and these then become part of our identity itself, as other people can see them.
This is not quiet feedback from close friends - the traditional way that we understand how our identity is perceived. This is the opinion of the masses, viewed by the masses.
Social media has, in part, become a huge exercise in public judgement. And, as anyone who has been shamed or bullied online knows, it can be incredibly powerful.
In small groups of individuals who know each other, the clash between how we see our identity and how others see it can be managed. Managing our identity on the internet takes much more work.
A man called "Jack" told the Guardian recently that he checks his social media profiles tens of times a day and how that takes him away from the physical world around him.
"I'll often see moments as 'good content' for my social media followers," he said. "It's almost like the photographing and sharing of a cool time is more important than actually appreciating it in real life."
This ability to comment on others, often from a distance, has given us a significant power without much corresponding responsibility.
Online, we regularly rate and comment on people and services in ways that, if we are British at least, we wouldn't think of doing face to face - and that changes our own identities too, from, to put it crudely, being reasonable human beings to acting as cowardly bullies.
The internet is heralded as being about connection. But in many ways it has given us the opportunity to disconnect our acts from their effects. How often do we, for example, consider the consequences of giving an Uber driver a low rating because we didn't like the way they spoke to us?
Yet falling below an average score of 4.5 stars puts Uber drivers at serious risk of being thrown off the network. Is that really what we had in mind when we tapped out our rating on the way out of the cab?
As well being a world of huge numbers, the internet is also about very high speeds - churning big numbers very quickly is about the only thing computers are good at. And we humans are in danger of trying to keep up with it - a race we can never win.
This means that the world feels much faster than it did even a quarter of a century ago. The same effect was felt in the early days of the industrial revolution in the late 18th Century.
We fret about replying quickly to emails and WhatsApp messages, we worry about not having instant answers to problems we face in life - the illusion created by Google - and we also flit very quickly between identities.
A good example of this is online activism. There are many organisations online that bring about significant change in the world by amassing the power of large numbers of people. And the internet gives us a way of expressing our opinions on geopolitical developments even from a long way away.
But, encouraged, I think, by the speed of the internet, we are also very fickle in the campaigns we support, because they require almost no effort to get involved.
Is it still the case that #weareallCharlieHebdo? Or that we are desperately concerned about the fate of the 200 schoolgirls kidnapped by Boko Haram in northern Nigeria in 2014? Or was it just too easy to send a tweet or sign a petition and then move on?
In one sense, of course, the world has (sadly) long been like this, with the news-cycle's intrinsic short attention span feeding our own. But identity is just as much about purpose and a cause as it is about appearance and opinion, and it is about our actions too. And when those actions stop at clicking on a link and entering our email address, it makes our identity, at the very least, dangerously superficial and fragile.
But, for me, the biggest threat to our identities comes from the internet's noise. I teach at The School of Life, which was set up by the philosopher Alain de Botton to help people think better about the lives they live.
About the author
David Baker is a journalist and broadcaster with a special interest in technology's impact on humanity. He was the founding managing editor of Wired in the UK and teaches at The School of Life in London and Brazil.
Many of the people who come to our classes complain of the difficulty of finding their "true" identity in amongst all the conflicting messages and demands of the world around them.
This idea, that, somewhere deep down, is the "real" us, is as old as philosophy itself. And it is probably the bedrock of our identity, because it involves things like our values, our sense of purpose, the beliefs that make us who we are. This is a long way from identity as defined by our culture or ethnicity, or as defined by the things we buy and Like.
It is more intimate than that, the part of us that keeps us understanding who we are when the rest of the world becomes overwhelming and confusing. At the School we often pose the question, "Are you living the life you want to be living, or the life other people want you to live?" (It comes from Socrates.)
The internet has brought the opinions of others flooding into our own lives as never before, and it is threatening our ability to understand who we really are.
To discover our true selves, maybe it's time to disconnect. Not for ever, that would be throwing away the baby with the bathwater, but for significant periods of our days, weeks, months. Because, with disconnection comes quiet and with quiet comes the ability to reflect.
In researching my World Service documentary Default World, for the BBC's season on identity, I spoke to a lot of people about their experience of technology.
Many said they were trying to spend less time online, taking a break from Facebook, connecting only when they needed to. And they spoke with pleasure of rediscovering the physical world around them and the world of human-to-human interaction, unmediated by computers. I think this is encouraging.
We are still learning how to be on the internet, what effect this huge network of computers, server farms, fibre-optic cables and radio signals - a network we have built ourselves - has on our sense of self. We are at the moment, as Thoreau said of people in the industrial revolution, "tools of our tools".
Disconnecting gives us a chance turn the tables - to see the internet not as something that overwhelms us but as a tool, which we use as and when we need it. Only then can we really understand who we are and what we can give the world. And that, deep down, is the real root of our identity.
As people become increasingly connected and more mobile, the BBC is exploring how identities are changing.
Catch up with programmes, downloads and clips from the season.
Where are you going? - The surprising answers to a simple question
Default World - The morals of the technical elite
Why I'm Not Just Blind - Must blind people be either inspirational or deserving pity?
Learn more about the BBC's Identity season, find all the programmes or join the discussion on Twitter using the hashtag #BBCIdentity.
Default World is broadcast on the BBC World Service at 18:00 GMT on Saturday 2 April and at 11:00 GMT on Sunday 3 April - catch up on BBC iPlayer Radio
Subscribe to the BBC News Magazine's email newsletter to get articles sent to your inbox.
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About 20,000 people have been taking part in a Gay Pride festival in the centre of Bristol.
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The free event was the culmination of a week of local activities which included films, talks and sports.
The festival began with a colourful parade through the city to Castle Park where two stages were set up for musical entertainment.
Organiser Anna Rutherford described the event as "amazing" and said the numbers who attended were higher than expected.
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Small, shiny and glowing with the promise of autumn, conkers were once irresistible to generations of children who baked them in ovens, dipped them in vinegar and put them on strings to enjoy playground conker fights. But, as record numbers of conkers fall from trees, the trend appears to be falling from fashion. BBC News Online asks why.
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By Jennifer ScottBBC News, England
As Aileen Francis and her two sons make one of their regular trips to their local sports centre, in Nottingham, they pass a line of horse chestnut trees.
Aileen's sons - aged 10 and 12 - dart forward and fill their bags and pockets with conkers.
"They love collecting them - we come home with massive bagfuls," said Mrs Francis. "But they don't have conker fights any more. I don't know anybody that does."
Children's disdain for conkers is something of a mystery.
"When I was at school, people would put them on string. But lately, there's not one child I have seen play with a conker on a string," said Mrs Francis.
"I'm not sure if they would be banned in schools because of health and safety. I don't think schools would want parents complaining if their children got hurt in a conker fight.
"I also think parents have less time to supervise their children baking conkers in ovens and then drilling holes in them - I wouldn't want mine doing that unsupervised. There's less time for old-fashioned play - particularly when children have tablets and computer games to entertain them."
In the early 2000s, a myth sprang up that the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) had banned conker fights. The HSE was even forced to put a denial on its website, describing the story as, "an old chestnut".
Some schools took to allowing their children to take part in fights provided they were wearing protective goggles - Cummersdale Primary School, in Cumbria, was one such school.
The school's current head teacher, Gareth Jones, says he would not object if children wanted to play with conkers - and the protective goggles would not be necessary - but many do not.
"It's hard to know why - they just don't seem very interested in conkers any more," he said.
One school - Cleve House in Knowle, Bristol - has sought to revive the tradition by staging conker tournaments for the past two years with a trophy for the winner.
Joint head Elaine Lawson said the idea was prompted by children bringing conkers into school and asking how to play.
"I think they had heard about conker fights at home and were keen to do something like that, so we made it into a bit of a tournament with a trophy," she said.
Mrs Lawson said it was "a pity" the school probably would not be able to leave children to play with conkers outside of a tournament, "for safety's sake".
"There has always been a risk attached to conkers, but more people seem more aware of it now," she said.
"Also, children are much less used to playing with them. Twenty years ago, children were playing conkers all the time - down the park, or on the street with their friends. Today, they don't know how to play as much."
Mrs Lawson added she had noticed today's children had fewer play skills than their predecessors - which is why it was important to keep traditional games like conkers alive.
"Games today either have to be organised, or sometimes children will copy something they have seen on TV, but they are rarely spontaneous," she said. "What we call 'old-fashioned games' is, in fact, just something children have always done for sheer pleasure."
All the more pity because the time is ripe for conkers, with more of the seeds in abundance than experts have seen for a long time.
"It has been an exceptional year," said David Knott, curator at Edinburgh's Royal Botanic Gardens.
"We had a very mild winter, while spring was excellent for pollinating insects which has led to a very good fruiting year for trees. They have also ripened marginally earlier.
"Horse chestnut trees are actually native to Northern Greece and Albania, so the conditions we have seen this year are more akin to their natural environment."
The organisers of the World Conker Championships, which are being held in Oundle, Northamptonshire, on Sunday, agreed there had been a "bumper crop".
In 2012, the Scottish Conker Championships were cancelled because of a lack of conkers.
This year however, the organisers of both competitions say conkers are bigger and better than ever.
Nicola Hunt, who judges the Scottish championships - being held in Peebles this year - says the crop is "outstanding".
"We are just out gathering them at the moment," she said. "We possibly do have less children taking part, but there is the great joy of foraging conkers - I don't think kids ever get tired of that. It's just they're not going on to play games as much as they used to."
And while children's interest may be diminishing, Mrs Hunt says their parents' love of the game is as strong as ever - in fact, it may be growing.
"In the seven years we have been running the competition, we have seen more and more adults taking part - they're just big kids," she said.
So, can she imagine conker fights continuing to grow as a niche interest but maybe led by adults, rather than children?
"Possibly," she said. "It's a really fun game that just epitomises autumn."
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The speaker of the Northern Ireland Assembly has written letters to all MLAs advising them of the importance of turning up to ask questions.
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William Hay said he had issued the letters after seven questions were not asked in the assembly last Tuesday.
The questions were either withdrawn at the last minute or the MLAs who submitted them were not present.
The lack of attendance provoked criticism from both the first minister and deputy first minister at the time.
"I want to avoid a repeat of the situation last week," Mr Hay said.
He added he wanted members to recognise the "seriousness of the situation" and said he would reintroduce sanctions on members if the conduct continued.
The TUV's Jim Allister said he would like the warning extended to ministers as questions he had submitted in writing were still unanswered after 16 months.
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Fashion house Chanel has apologised to a Shetland knitwear designer over similar garments at their 2016 preview show that she was not credited for.
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Buyers visited Mati Ventrillon in Fair Isle earlier this year and said anything they purchased would be for research purposes only.
However, near identical sweaters then appeared in a recent Chanel show.
Chanel said it resulted from a dysfunctionality within its teams and apologised.
The company said it would also now credit Ms Ventrillon's work to recognise her as the source of inspiration for the knitwear.
The Fair Isle designer said she had a "great respect" for Chanel and hoped luxury labels and craft designers could continue to work together.
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For more than 30 years, cult leader Aravindan Balakrishnan convinced his victims he was "all powerful and all-seeing" - a master manipulator who used violence, fear and sexual degradation to control the women he held captive in communes across London.
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By Tom Symonds & Lauren PottsBBC News
His daughter was one of them.
Born into her father's Communist "collective", she spent her childhood almost entirely isolated from the outside world.
She never went to school or played with a friend her own age, but spent years cooped up in the various houses occupied by the group.
Southwark Crown Court heard how, as a child, she was so painfully alone she spoke to the taps and toilet for company - hugging them for being "nice" to her.
On one occasion, she was so desperate to see an unfamiliar face she fabricated a water leak in an airing cupboard in the hope someone would come to fix it.
This was the sad picture painted in the diaries of a girl who was kept in captivity most of her life.
But how did this happen?
At Aravindan Balakrishnan's trial, jurors heard how the cult leader likened himself to God and believed himself to be the "centre of the natural world".
Through a brutal regime of violence and sexual degradation, he sought to mould his followers into a "cadre of women soldiers" he believed could help him overthrow "the fascist state".
There were rapes and victims were beaten and told "bad ideas could burn you to death". He made it, the prosecution said, so they were "too frightened to leave but hated to stay".
To those with the luxury of free will, the fact these women stayed might seem baffling.
But Graham Baldwin, manager of Catalyst Counselling, which supports victims of cults, said those caught up in Balakrishnan's web would have been taught to believe their lives were "satisfying".
"What normally happens is a leader says: 'I've got special knowledge, I know how to make your life better and the world better but you've got to do what I say'," he explained.
"Then it becomes a process of breaking down a person's ego, so that he is incompetent. They are told they are the new world order and this is their great moment... [and] if they leave the group or betray it then God is going to punish them."
Jurors heard Balakrishnan's political views were influenced by what he saw as post-war British mistreatment of the people of Malaysia and Singapore, where he lived from 1949.
He moved to London in the 1960s and began giving political speeches, earning a reputation as a "charismatic man" whose ideals struck a chord.
It was the height of the Cold War and a period when the UK had a plethora of small left-wing collectives and communes.
The many empty houses of south London in particular were targeted by left-wing groups for the purpose of collective living.
"It had been a worrying and oppressing time and finding someone a bit like you, who has the same idea about the world you want to live in, living with them was not so unusual," said historian Dr Lucy Robinson.
"It was a time when all sort of ideas were up for grabs. People did go out and make their own politics.
"[But] this [case] is not a lesson about communes and counter-culture, but a lesson about abuse, because you could normally just leave a commune."
Balakrishnan and his wife Chandra ran a bookshop and commune from a large building in Brixton, where he started his so-called "Workers Institute" in 1974.
He initially claimed his teachings were based on those of Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong but by 1980 the "collective" had evolved into a "Cult of Bala", far removed from its original ideals.
Only a handful of women remained and were kept under Balakrishnan's strict control - prevented from seeing family members and governed by a strict rota of work and chores.
Regular beatings eventually evolved into the sexual abuse of at least two women, who Balakrishnan claimed were being "purified" or "cleansed" by the acts he forced upon them.
Stephen Chang attended a number of political talks given by Balakrishnan between 1968 and 1971
His appearance [now] does not reflect in any way who he was.
In the early days he was well groomed, he was smart, he took great care of his hair, the way he wore his glasses, the way he conducted himself.
He was extremely knowledgeable and a great orator... but in his environment, we began to realise you didn't have a choice, you had to listen to what he said.
That's when my relationship broke up with him.
He's definitely a psychopath, I have no doubts about that. He has all the characteristics of a psychopath - they have no remorse, no guilt, they're manipulative, they have a great sense of self-grandeur, they have objectives that are totally unrealistic.
He meets people, he impresses them with his knowledge and storytelling skills, he gleans info about their private lives and uses that to create doubts within that individual and their capabilities and makes them emotionally dependent on him, like a cult leader.
Balakrishnan's daughter was born into the collective after one of its earliest members, Sian Davies, became pregnant.
But the girl's status as the youngest member of the commune did not save her from physical punishment and she lived in perpetual fear of incurring the wrath of "Jackie", a mind control machine the defendant claimed had the power to torture her.
She lived in fear of her father's "Jekyll and Hyde" character: "When he was nice, he could be very nice, but when he was not he was frightening," the court heard.
Speaking to the BBC, she recalled an incident in which the defendant took away her balloon when she was 10 years old.
"He punctured it because I liked it. He said: 'This is really good because I can use the stick to whip you'."
It was against this backdrop that Balakrishnan, now 75, was able to oppress his victims for so long.
The court heard his views were "so deeply instilled in them all they were too scared to oppose him".
Mr Baldwin said that, far from being unintelligent, the kind of person often caught up in a cult tends to be bright but idealistic.
He said some fall victim very quickly and, in one case the charity dealt with, a gap-year student was recruited into a cult during a 12-hour flight stopover in New York.
But, he warned, it can take much longer to leave.
Yvonne Hall and Gerard Stocks of the Palm Cove Society, which rescued the women
"We have spent a lot of time working with them and the progress has been outstanding; [the daughter] is very competent and is looking at moving to independent living and she's studying at college," said Ms Hall.
"They were all told the outside world was a very hostile place and if they went out bad things would happen to them: they would get killed or raped or disappear. The youngest one was told if she left the property she would spontaneously combust.
"[When the daughter came out] she wasn't able to navigate from A to B, she wasn't able to use public transport or go shopping independently, or do day-to-day activities that a normal 30-year-old could do."
Mr Stocks added: "She couldn't cross the road. It took us two-and-a-half weeks to teach her how to do that herself and now she can get about just fine, but when she came out it was very different.
"We're looking at a man who manipulated and controlled people to a height none of us can really imagine."
For Balakrishnan's daughter, it was only when she reached her 20s that she began to realise the extent of her confinement.
She started fantasising about men and developed a crush on a neighbour. Though she never spoke to him, she was devastated when the commune moved to another estate, writing in her diary: "I was cruelly wrenched away from my beloved darling, I have never [had] anything to look forward to."
An infatuation with a second neighbour turned into a sexual relationship - he would climb through a window to visit her - but this ended when Balakrishnan caught them and beat her.
She believes she suffered a miscarriage a few weeks later.
Fed up with being "a non-person", in 2005 she plucked up the courage to flee the commune.
Ill-equipped to cope in the outside world, she went to a police station - where she was told to go back to the collective or risk being reported as a missing person.
It would be another eight years before she finally managed to escape for good - by that point seriously ill with diabetes - setting off the chain of events that would lead to her father's arrest.
Now 32, she is no longer at the mercy of the man who for years she knew only as Comrade Bala, and the note she left him the day she left suggests a woman determined to make up for lost time:
"I may have no wealth, no property, but I do have my dignity and I will defend it with my life," she wrote.
But she also hopes to build bridges with her father.
"I forgive him and I would like to reconcile with him in the future, because hatred does no good to anyone," she told the BBC.
"Nelson Mandela said if you leave a place with anger and hatred and bitterness, then you are still in prison and I don't want to be in prison that way."
Additional reporting: Beth Rose
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Will Ferrell's Eurovision movie, The Story of Fire Saga, was only released on Friday, but it's already leapt to number one on Netflix's most-watched movies chart.
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By Mark SavageBBC music reporter
The comedy follows the fortunes of an inept Icelandic band, Fire Saga - Lars Erickssong (Will Ferrell) and Sigrit Ericksdottir (Rachel McAdams) - who get the chance to fulfil a lifelong dream when they're selected to enter the 2020 Eurovision Song Contest.
Written with obvious affection by Ferrell, the film is crammed full of Easter eggs and cameos for long-time fans.
It features a band called Moon Fang, whose horrific masks are a call-back to 2006's Eurovision winners Lordi, while a sing-off in the middle of the film features guest appearances from real-life contestants Alexander Rybak, Conchita Wurst and Netta.
Ferrell's character even performs inside a giant hamster wheel - just like Ukraine's entrant in 2014.
Despite US publications having to explain Eurovision to confused viewers, and reviewers turning up their noses, the film has already picked up a legion of fans.
On review aggregator Metacritic, viewers have rated it 7.8 out of 10, compared to 4.9 from critics.
But as with all films "based on true events", The Story of Fire Saga takes a certain amount of dramatic licence with the facts.
Just for fun, here are a few moments where the film gets it wrong... And two where it is surprisingly accurate.
1) The first scene instantly raises questions...
Every film needs an inciting incident that sets the plot wheels turning - and Eurovision: The Story of Fire Saga doesn't waste any time in that respect.
The opening scene finds Lars and Sigrit as children, watching Abba performing Waterloo at the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest.
Lars immediately (and correctly) falls in love with the band's glam rock ode to the Napoleonic wars, and sets his sights on winning Eurovision himself one day.
But at that time, Iceland didn't take part in Eurovision. In fact, they didn't even broadcast the contest live until 1983, and only entered for the first time in 1986.
The adults are also seen drinking beer as they watch the contest - but Iceland had strict prohibition laws outlawing full-strength beer until 1989.
Another by-product of using Abba's victory as a framing device is that Fire Saga are in their 50s by the time they finally get to perform at Eurovision (although Sigrit appears to have aged a lot slower than Lars).
That's perfectly feasible, though: Eurovision's oldest-ever singer was Natalya Pugacheva from Russia's Buravno Grannies, who was 77 when she took part in 2012. An honourable mention also goes to Emil Ramsauer, who played double bass for the Swiss entry, Takasa, in 2013 at the age of 95.
2) The Netherlands won Eurovision in 2019, but the contest is being held in Scotland...
Fire Saga meet their competition for the first time at a party hosted by Russian entrant Alexander Lemtov (Dan Stevens, chewing up the scenery like a particularly hungry sex kitten).
"This Julia Jay," he purrs, introducing the UK contender in broken English.
"She come number one in England's Got Talent four years ago, so she quite good - but everyone hates UK, so zero points."
It's a well-observed gag - except that the 2020 contest is being held in Scotland meaning that... er, the UK won Eurovision last year.
There are two ways to explain this one away: First of all, the UK could have stepped in as host if the real winners (The Netherlands) had declined to stage the competition. This has happened six times in the past, although not since 1980.
Alternatively, Fire Saga are competing in an alternate timeline where Scotland has devolved from the rest of the UK, and seen their Eurovision chances recover as a result. They probably sent The Proclaimers.
3) The performers keep breaking the rules
Eurovision has a lot of archaic rules, mostly designed to keep an incredibly complex live TV show from going off the rails. Unencumbered by those constraints, the film takes a few minor liberties when it recreates the contest.
Sweden's act, Johnny John John, has seven performers on stage when the maximum is six (gasp!).
Lars's piano is actually wired up and plugged in, so he can play live - which is actually forbidden (double gasp!).
And most egregiously of all, Fire Saga's song Double Trouble lasts three minutes and 22 seconds, exceeding the maximum permissible length by almost half-a-minute. (Mér er ofboðið!)
4) The scoring is all wonky
As Eurovision fans know, the contest actually stretches over five days, with two semi-finals preceding the grand finale. From each of those heats, 10 acts stay in the competition, and the rest are unceremoniously sent home.
In the film, Fire Saga's semi-final performance goes disastrously wrong - and they retreat to the backstage area, certain that their dreams are over, to watch the scores coming in.
But in real life, the scores aren't revealed during the semi-final. Instead, they're kept secret until the entire contest has ended, to ensure there are no clear favourites going into the final.
In the film-makers' defence, the voting sequence serves a dramatic purpose - ramping up the tension and raising the stakes for Fire Saga as the film enters its third act.
But there's a continuity error that's illogical at best, and careless at worst...
5) Iceland's score keeps resetting
Every time a country awards points to Iceland, their score is shown to be zero. But Eurovision points are cumulative, so you would expect to see their total rise as more votes were cast.
What's more, the scoreboard shows Germany, Spain and the UK taking part in the semi-final when, in reality, all three qualify automatically for the finale as part of the "big five" financial contributors.
In the screenshot above, you might also notice that The Netherlands appear to have entered the contest twice. Is that what's known as "double Dutch"?
6) Edinburgh's geography makes no sense
Films often take liberties with the layout of a city, but Fire Saga really takes the biscuit (or in this case the Highland Shortbread).
For a start, Dan Stevens' character owns a lavish Scottish mansion that offers sweeping, panoramic views of Arthur's Seat and Edinburgh Castle.
To get those views in real life, the castle would have to be located at the top of Calton Hill in the city centre - which would mean he'd built his house on a world heritage site, over the top of the Nelson Monument. (In reality, the mansion was Knebworth House, 367 miles away in Stevenage, and the backdrops were added in post-production.)
Causing more confusion for cartographers everywhere, the film's performance segments were clearly filmed at Glasgow's Hydro Arena - which has somehow been picked up and deposited at the end of Edinburgh's George IV Bridge.
It's almost as bad as the time Thor caught the London Underground.
7) Graham Norton keeps interrupting the songs
When Terry Wogan stood down from the commentary box in 2008, after 35 years, few expected that Graham Norton would fit so snugly into his shoes.
Yet over the last 12 years, the presenter has proved wonderfully adept at guiding us through the night, with his eyebrows permanently set to, "oh, really?"
"If you're going to get someone to dress as a gorilla," he commented on Italy's 2017 performance, "at least get a decent outfit. That looks like couple of old car seats sewn together."
But no matter how dire a performance gets, Norton never talks over it, allowing viewers to absorb every excruciating moment.
The film throws that rule out the window, however, and has Norton providing commentary for every act while they're on stage. He even swears, which would get him into all sorts of trouble with Ofcom.
8) The hosts aren't from the host country
Each year, the host country chooses two (or more) presenters to helm the four-hour Eurovision extravaganza.
Traditionally they are awkward, stilted, cursed with the worst script known to mankind, and completely unknown outside their home country - although honourable exceptions include A-Ha's Morten Harket, Boyzone's Ronan Keating and Israeli supermodel Bar Rafaeli.
So it seems unlikely that the BBC would choose the heavily-accented "Corin Ladvitch" and "Sasha More" to helm the show if it took place in Scotland.
For reference, the last time the UK hosted Eurovision in (unravels scroll of parchment) 1998, the presenters were Terry Wogan and Ulrika Jonsson. These days, we'd probably see Graham Norton, Mel Giedroyc or Dermot O'Leary helming the show for the Beeb.
...And two things it gets right
In an early scene, Lars and Sigrit are standing on the docks of their hometown of Húsavík in North Iceland, when two humpback whales breach the surface of the Greenland Sea and soar into the air.
While they're clearly CGI (the water would be too shallow), humpback and orca whales are common visitors to the area, and regular whale watching trips set sail from the nearby Skjálfandi bay.
You can see footage of humpbacks in Húsavík here and some amazing stills on photographer Daniel Enchev's Flickr stream.
You might also be surprised to learn that the film's sub-plot about Elves who assist Fire Saga in their journey to Eurovision has some basis in fact.
According to a 2007 study by the University of Iceland, more than 60% of the nation believes in the existence of Huldufólk, or hidden people, who occasionally lend a helping hand to humans.
You can read more about the phenomenon on the BBC Travel website. Or maybe you'd just prefer to watch Ja Ja Ding Dong for the 90th time. Today.
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Paolo Gabriele, Pope Benedict's former butler, begins an 18-month prison sentence today inside the Vatican walls, after being found guilty by a Vatican City court of stealing sensitive documents from the Pope's desk. What will life be like for the only prisoner inside the world's smallest sovereign state?
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By David WilleyBBC News, Rome
The Pope's former butler is being treated "leniently and justly" according to Vatican authorities, and may even benefit from a papal pardon before the end of his prison term, if he shows repentance and apologises to Pope Benedict and all the other people who work for the Holy See for the scandal he caused.
But for the moment he has exchanged his modest "grace and favour" three-bedroom apartment just inside the walls of the Vatican for a sparsely furnished detention room inside the headquarters of the Pope's private police force, the Vatican Gendarmerie.
Not only has he been sacked, but he now risks losing his home as well, situated almost next door to his former workplace, the Papal apartments on the top floor of the Apostolic Palace.
Vatican City has a railway station - with only one train a week bringing in bonded duty-free goods, a Post Office, a radio station, a pharmacy, a supermarket, a fire brigade, a five-star hotel, and one of the world's most visited museums, but it has no prison - and no dungeons.
Its only crime problem is normally to catch and prosecute the pesky thieves and pickpockets who frequently relieve pilgrims and tourists of their wallets and handbags during crowded church ceremonies inside Saint Peter's Basilica or while walking through the Vatican museums.
They are normally handed over to Italian police for processing and trial if necessary. Law and order inside the tiny territory is in the hands of the 130-strong Vatican Gendarmerie staffed almost entirely by ex-members of the Italian Carabinieri and State police. In charge is Inspector-General Domenico Giani, who formerly worked for the Italian Secret Services.
While the 120 members of the Pope's Swiss Guard carry out ceremonial and guard duties inside the mini-state, the blue-uniformed police are responsible for traffic and border control, and criminal investigations.
The Vatican police came under criticism from Paolo Gabriele during his trial. He accused them of putting him in a cramped detention cell inside police headquarters where he was held for 15 days with the light switched on day and night and with scarcely room to raise his arms.
The Gendarmerie explained that this was done to prevent Gabriele from harming himself, and that he himself had asked for the light to be left on at night and was given a sleeping mask.
The butler has now been given a larger detention cell. He will be allowed regular visits by his family - he has three children - and will receive spiritual counselling from a priest. He will also be allowed to attend Sunday mass under police escort.
The tortures inflicted on victims of the Holy Inquisition for heresy from the Middle Ages onwards are legendary. Visitors to Rome can still see some of the dungeons into which prisoners of the Church used to be thrown.
The dungeons of the Castel Sant'Angelo, a papal fortress just near the Vatican, inspired the 18th Century Italian artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi to create his famous series of imaginary etchings of Roman prisons - I Carceri.
But the Vatican Gendarmes insist that the conditions under which Gabriele will be held fully respect the Geneva Convention on torture and "conform to the detention standards applicable to other countries in analogous circumstances".
Gabriele, a Vatican citizen, has already spent five months since his arrest last May in detention or under house arrest, so in theory he has another 13 months to serve.
His case has caused huge embarrassment to the Vatican authorities and to Pope Benedict in person. They fear he might spill further secrets if he were to serve his term in an Italian prison, which under present treaty arrangements between the Holy See and Italy, he should do.
Ali Agca, the Turkish gunman who tried to assassinate Pope John Paul ll in 1981 was tried and sentenced by an Italian court after his capture in Saint Peter's Square, over which jurisdiction is shared between the Italy and the Vatican. He spent 19 years in an Italian jail before being deported to Turkey.
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China's President Xi Jinping heads to Davos this week.
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Karishma VaswaniAsia business correspondent@BBCKarishmaon Twitter
It's the first time a Chinese head of state is attending the global forum and he'll be star of the show.
But besides the allure of snow-capped alpine peaks and tasty cups of hot chocolate, why is he doing this? And why now?
First off, let's not kid ourselves. Davos is a venue where little meaningful gets done.
It has struggled to shake its reputation as a very expensive talking shop that sees the rich and powerful of global business, politics, arts and society meet every year to sip cocktails and connect.
Along the way they're supposed to think big thoughts about how to improve the world economy.
But given that their wealth and lifestyles are precisely what many parts of the developed world is seeing a backlash against right now, it's not clear how much their solutions will help.
Davos: Are the global elite in retreat?
Globalisation and free trade are being attacked in the US and Europe. And with a new president about to enter the White House, President Xi's speech will be watched very carefully.
According to Jiang Jianguo, a minister in China's State Council Information office, President Xi will be "offering Chinese remedies for the world's economic ailments".
So what might he say, and why is this important? Here are three things I'll be watching for:
1) Free trade is good trade
Globalisation has arguably benefited China more than any other country in the world.
As the US pulls out of free trade agreements, President Xi is likely to laud its merits, and position China as the world's newest and friendliest trading partner.
Of course, there's always the criticism that China only opens up its economy just enough to benefit itself.
But President Xi is likely to tackle that too. Chinese leaders tend to make big announcements in speeches abroad, so watch out for any further possible access to China's economy.
2) China as a force for peace, not war
It's part of China's public diplomacy to convince the world that China's rise is a good thing for everyone.
President Xi will be likely to present an image of China to the world "as a friend to everyone, a big wonderful panda that everyone should hug, and that everyone should just relax," says Prof Kerry Brown of the Lau China Institute at King's College London.
But this may be a hard sell, especially given the lingering concerns about China's growing military might in the South China Sea.
Davos is a good opportunity to challenge these perceptions, says Jia Xiudong, at the China Institute of International Affairs in Beijing.
"Other countries may see China as an aggressive, assertive country. But this is a misunderstanding. That's why it's such a good opportunity for the president to communicate his message."
Oh, and that no-one will be unfurling Free Tibet flags or heckling him (at least not inside the venue) will probably be an added benefit.
3) It's all about symbolism, silly
President Xi's speech comes just three days before Donald Trump is inaugurated as the 45th president of the United States.
"America is downgraded slightly in the eyes of the world because of the election," says Prof Brown. "And China is more prominent - so it's quite significant."
Vanity is also a factor. President Xi enjoys massive popularity at home, and, as you might expect, would like to see that level of respect paid to him on the international stage.
What better way to do that than to praise the virtues of China's economic wisdom to a receptive crowd, at a time when faith in the US's ability as the de facto superpower is being questioned and dissatisfaction for the free market system - and the inequality it has created - is rising.
But while President Xi may enjoy being thrust into the spotlight on the Davos stage, it won't erase some of the hard truths he has to deal with back home.
China's economy is slowing down and its currency, the yuan, is weakening to lows not seen since 2008.
All of this has Beijing extremely concerned. China knows better than most that a growing gap between the haves and the have nots is devastating for social stability.
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The story of the fire at the Manchester Dogs' Home has seen animal-lovers flock to donate more than £750,000 and raise awareness by posting "selfies" of themselves and their dog. But why do some tragedies provoke such outpourings when others do not?
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By Jenny ScottBBC News
The corner of Kaylea Brough's beauty salon, in Bolton, is crammed with donations.
Gifts of dog beds, blankets and pet food have been left all morning by passers-by, eager to try to help more than 150 dogs down the road in Manchester who are homeless at the second time of asking, thanks to a fire in which many died.
Kaylea herself has three dogs - two shih tzus and a Chihuahua - named Patrick, Millie and Daisy and says she instantly identified with the tragedy.
She put out a call on social media on Friday morning, asking for customers and passers-by to drop off items to help the animals.
"I'm known as the 'Crazy Dog Lady' so people wouldn't have expected anything less of me," she said.
"I'm a massive dog lover and I could instantly imagine how scared those poor animals will be."
On social media, the story has also sparked a huge response.
Celebrities, such as Ricky Gervais, have led the fundraising charge, along with papers like the Manchester Evening News.
A craze for dog selfies has also taken off on social media, with people showing their support for the campaign by taking photographs of themselves and their pets.
When asked why he had taken part, animal-lover Regan Shepherd said: "I am a pet lover. I have Barney, who is a pug, and my mum has two dogs as well."
"I'm a massive animal fan in general and like to give to charity but dogs really pull at my heartstrings," added Chloe Rivers, who has posted a selfie with her dog, Miso.
"People want to prove they have a genuine connection to a cause and a legitimate reason for supporting it, so proving you have a loved pet is a way of saying 'this is my thing'," said Dr Beth Breeze, the director of the Centre for Philanthropy at the University of Kent.
According to a study by the National Council for Voluntary Organisations and the Charities Aid Foundation, we give markedly more to charities related to medical research - mainly cancer, hospitals, children and animals than we do to groups supporting religious, disabled, overseas and homeless causes.
"It's not that we dismiss those other causes," said Dr Breeze. "It's just what people identify with.
"Nobody is saying a dog is more important than somebody dying in a famine - they're just saying, 'This is what I know about and care about.'"
She says there is often no rhyme or reason as to why some campaigns - such as Staffordshire teenager Stephen Sutton's extraordinary fundraising efforts for the teenage cancer trust, and Claire Squires, the Leicestershire runner who died during the 2012 London Marathon - enjoy such meteoric success.
Often, she says, the emotional grip of a particular story is something that is beyond a charity's control.
The Manchester Dogs' Home campaign is, in some ways, the perfect example of a story that is likely to resonate in a very personal way, she says.
"Animals are a very British concern," she said.
"You don't find the same support for animal charities in other countries. There is something very specific about animal causes that expresses how passionately we feel towards our pets."
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There is a limited paper-trail between DUP special advisers during a key phase of the RHI debacle when it was alleged they were thwarting attempts to delay the introduction of cost controls, the public inquiry has been told.
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By Conor MacauleyBBC NI Agriculture & Environment Correspondent
Most of their communications were over the phone or in meetings which were not minuted, RHI Inquiry counsel David Scoffield QC told the panel.
The inquiry has begun to look at the summer of 2015 when the scheme was running out of control and attempts were made to stem the flow of money.
A central allegation made by former DUP minister Jonathan Bell is that he was thwarted in attempts to close the scheme by a number of DUP special advisers (spads), including Timothy Johnston and Andrew Crawford.
'Highly contentious'
At the time, Mr Johnston was adviser to the then First Minister Peter Robinson.
Mr Crawford was working in finance with the then minister Arlene Foster.
Both men have denied the allegation and Mr Scoffield said much of Mr Bell's evidence in respect of this period was "highly contentious".
The inquiry has checked personal email accounts of key participants in this period and, where available, had mobile phones analysed.
But in most cases, Mr Scoffield said, the information did not go as far back as 2015.
He said in some cases this was because people had cleaned out their inbox.
They may also have handed back departmental phones which were wiped and passed to other civil servants.
"I think it's fair to say that there's less of a paper-trail in terms of relevant communications between spads than this inquiry would have liked to have seen," Mr Scoffield said.
He said as a result of the lack of supporting paperwork the inquiry would be heavily reliant on the witness statements and oral evidence of the special advisers who would be called to give evidence and its assessment of what it heard.
Mr Scoffield said if special advisers or others had been engaged in "anything improper or on the fringes of what they knew to be permissible" and which might be embarrassing for them or their parties, that might provide an incentive to ensure "that less rather than more was recorded in recoverable form".
He said the inquiry might want to consider whether among special advisers and civil servants there might have been a practice to ensure that "embarrassing or controversial material" was not placed on the formal record.
Restaurant row
Later the inquiry was told of a row in a London restaurant in June 2015 involving former enterprise minister Jonathan Bell and his adviser Timothy Cairns.
The inquiry heard there was some evidence that emerging problems in the RHI scheme were "in the mix".
Both men were part of a departmental delegation to meet with Amber Rudd, the then minister with responsibility for energy and climate change.
David Scoffield told the inquiry that Mr Bell and Mr Cairns had a sometimes "difficult" relationship.
The two fell out in an Indian restaurant the night before the meeting over the extent to which Mr Bell was able, as minister, to take his own decisions without recourse to the wider DUP.
The row continued at breakfast the next day and several officials were asked to leave the table.
Mr Bell told Mr Cairns he would not be coming to the meeting with Amber Rudd and Mr Cairns flew home without attending.
Mr Bell has told the inquiry he believed his adviser was acting at the behest of other DUP spads to delay the introduction of cost controls to the controversial scheme.
DUP spad Andrew Crawford, who had moved on from the enterprise department to finance, was still providing advice to Timothy Cairns about the RHI scheme because he had a detailed knowledge of it from his own time in enterprise.
Mr Cairns said the arrangement had been set up by Timothy Johnston, then adviser to First Minister Peter Robinson.
'Evidential dispute'
Mr Cairns said he understood the purpose of it was that the DUP could reach a party position on RHI.
Mr Scoffield said Mr Cairns' evidence was that Mr Crawford suggested cost controls "should be delayed to the latest date that officials would recommend".
He said this whole area was the subject of an "evidential dispute".
Mr Scoffield said the inquiry would also want to try and establish why it had taken so long to get ministerial sign off for a proposal for cost controls in the RHI scheme.
It was provided by officials on July 8th, but wasn't signed off by Mr Bell until September.
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When Salama Ali started investigating the disappearance of two younger brothers last year she made an awful discovery - not only were radicalised young Kenyan men leaving to join the al-Shabab militants in neighbouring Somalia, but women were being seized and trafficked by the group as sex slaves.
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By Charlotte AttwoodBBC News, Mombasa
Salama's search for information about her brothers had to be carried out quietly and confidentially, as any hint of a connection with the al-Qaeda-linked al-Shabab can arouse the suspicion of the security forces.
So she met discreetly with other women in Mombasa and the surrounding area, sharing stories and seeking information about male relatives who had vanished.
"We discovered there were lots of us," Salama says.
But Salama also uncovered something very different - stories of women who had been taken to Somalia against their will.
The women were both young and old, from Christian and Muslim communities, from Mombasa and other parts of Kenya's coastal region. They were usually promised high-paid work in another town or abroad, and then kidnapped.
Last September Salama trained as a counsellor and set up a secret support group for returning women. Word spread and soon women began seeking her out and asking to join the group.
Some arrived with babies, she says, some with HIV, and some with mental illness caused by their experiences. All are terrified to speak openly, because of the risk of being mistakenly identified as an al-Shabab sympathiser.
In a dark room with the curtains drawn, I meet this extraordinary group of women, who have a story that has never been told.
"Men used to come and have sex with me - I can't tell you the number," says one, shaking her head as she recounts her ordeal. "For those three years, every man was coming to sleep with me."
"They'd bring two or three men for each woman every night," says another. "We would be raped repeatedly."
Some women were forced to become the "wives" of al-Shabab militants, it appears, while others were held as slaves in a brothel.
Find out more
Al-Shabab is fighting to create a fundamentalist Islamic state in Somalia and has launched attacks on neighbouring countries, which have all sent troops to fight them as part of an African Union force.
Kenya has borne the brunt of al-Shabab's counter-attacks, and the Kenyan army is hunting fighters in the thick Boni Forest that straddles the border with Somalia.
Flying over it, you can see lines cut through it - narrow pathways that militants apparently use for transport. The BBC has spoken to more than 20 women and all talk of being held in a thick forest or transported through it. This is most likely to be Boni.
One new member of Salama's group, Faith, has only recently escaped captivity.
She was 16 when she was approached by an elderly couple and offered a job in Malindi, further up the coast. Desperate for work, the next day she boarded a bus with 14 other passengers and all were given drugged water to drink.
"When we regained consciousness, there were two men inside the room," Faith says. "They blindfolded us with black scarves. They raped us in that room."
Drugged again, Faith woke up in a small clearing in a dark forest and was told she would be killed if she tried to escape.
Terrified, she spent the next three years alone cooking for a group of Somali men "with long long beards".
She had also become pregnant, as a result of being raped, and had to deliver her own child alone in the forest.
"My grandmother was a traditional midwife, so I had a little bit of knowledge," she says. "Everything I was doing in that forest was alone, so I just had to get out this baby alone."
Faith finally managed to escape with her daughter when a traditional healer foraging for medicinal roots in the forest came across her and showed her the way out. Her child, who grew up naked in the forest, now finds it hard to adapt to city life and struggles to fall asleep at night unless she is outside in her mother's arms.
She grew accustomed to "living like we were animals in the forest", Faith says.
A number of the women who spoke to the BBC had given birth in captivity.
Sarah, the wife of a former al-Shabab fighter, says this is no coincidence. There is an organised programme to breed the next generation of fighters, she says, as it's hard to recruit people to live in camps in Somalia, and children are easy to indoctrinate.
"In my camp, there [were] women who are sent to come and recruit other women," Sarah says. "They want to multiply so they just want women to give birth."
Most of the 300 women in her camp were Kenyan, she says.
Salama also provides support to those who have lost family members, including Elizabeth, who last saw her sister two years ago, before she left for what she thought was a job in Saudi Arabia.
A month later, she called.
"She told us she was in a dangerous and bad place in Somalia, in an al-Shabab camp," says Elizabeth. The line broke - and her sister has not been heard from since.
The Kenyan government acknowledges there is a problem but Evans Achoki, the county commissioner in Mombasa, says it's hard to judge the scale of it, because the women won't come forward.
While there is an amnesty programme for fighters returning from Somalia, and some have been rehabilitated, there are also reports of men who have suddenly disappeared, or been shot dead.
"People fear the government," says Sureya Hersi of Sisters Without Borders, a network of Kenyan organisations working to counter radical extremism in Kenya's coastal region.
"Those who went there willingly and unwillingly are both looked at as guilty."
The names of all women in this story have been changed for their security
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We are a nation known for enjoying a cup of tea and a nice slice of cake - but it seems the modern-day cafe-goer increasingly has a taste for more unusual fare. From feline fun to cereal thrillers, quirky cafes are popping up around the country to serve the needs of the 21st Century gastronome.
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By Duncan LeatherdaleBBC News
Cereal capers
Cereal cafes have gone serial.
It started with the Cereal Killer Cafe on London's Brick Lane but now they are popping up around the nation.
Black Milk Cereal Dive opened five months ago in Manchester's Affleck's Palace.
It sells 150 types of cereal from across the world served with a variety of milks in bowls made from chocolate.
Customers are looking for that kind of novelty so they can tell their friends about it on social media, claims founder Oliver Lloyd-Taylor.
"People want to try something new and I think a lot of that is driven by social media" he said.
"They are looking for eccentric things to share."
Building breakfasts with an unusual twist is also the order of the day at 26 Grains, a porridge bar that opened in Covent Garden two months ago.
Alex Hely-Hutchinson was inspired to specialise in savoury and sweet porridge after living in Denmark.
"Eating breakfast out is done a lot more there."
And the rise in specialist eateries is unsurprising, she said.
"The attitude of customers is changing but so is that of the producers; our understanding of the different options is growing so we are offering people more.
"We have also seen some health scares around food in recent years so people are suddenly much more aware of what they are eating. By going to specialists they know what they are getting and their questions can be answered."
Mugs and moggies
As well as being tea-drinkers the English are animal lovers - the RSPCA was formed 60 years before children's protection charity the NSPCC.
So it stands to reason that we would enjoy cuddling cats while supping cuppas.
Cat cafes have cropped up around the country, from Lady Dinah's in London to Newcastle's Mog on the Tyne and Maison de Moggy in Edinburgh.
The Kitty Cafe in Nottingham opened in March.
"You will still get the traditional coffee shop where people go with their laptops, that won't change, but you do see more people now wanting something a bit different," says director Elliot Reed.
"They want to spend their money on different things so there is a huge place for niche cafes."
Kitty Cafe also acts as a rehoming centre and Mr Reed says it is proving highly successful at finding its feline stars new families.
"People can see the cats chilling out, they can see how they are with children and other animals, they get a much better idea of how the cats would be at home than they do at a normal rescue centre."
Snack shacks
Once the preserve of hard-up, hungry students, crisp sandwiches are now apparently a permissible meal.
Andrew McMenamin created a storm in a crisp packet when he opened a temporary stall selling maize snacks betwixt bread in Belfast in January, but now West Yorkshire has a permanent eating establishment dedicated to the treat.
Mr Crisp in Keighley offers 50 varieties of crisp ranging from the traditional potato chip to the more modern Monster Munch.
Mark Pearson said: "I saw the sandwich shop in Belfast and being the biggest crisp monster myself decided to take on the idea myself.
"I would love to expand, it is England's first and I am quite sure it won't be the last."
Crisps, cereal and cheese toasties are for some the taste of childhood, snacks we enjoyed in our early years.
And nostalgia is a huge part of the success of cafes based on such foodstuffs according to Gugu Ndhlovu, general manager of the Meltroom in Soho in Central London, which specialises in grilled cheese sandwiches.
"We play 90s music as well so people come in and get excited because it reminds them of being younger," she said.
"These are the sorts of things people ate and enjoyed when they were children, it's fun for them to try those foods again."
Rubbish food
There are dozens of restaurants selling rubbish meals - food saved from going to waste.
The Real Junk Food Project was launched in 2013 and now consists of 65 cafes and restaurants selling only recycled food.
Perfectly fine food that would have otherwise been sent to landfill, animal feed or anaerobic digestion is now served to diners.
Project founder Adam Smith of Armley Junk-tion in Leeds says they are rejecting legislation in favour of common sense.
"We are taking food that is past its expiry date, has suffered accidental damage or is just surplus, and feeding it to people," Mr Smith said.
"We have fed 75,000 bellies with 102 tonnes of food in the last two months, it has grown so much quicker than we thought it would - and not one person has reported feeling sick because of what they have been served.
"People are now questioning the ethics and responsibility of food outlets and are being a lot more responsible themselves in the way they eat."
The cafes all sell their food on a pay-what-you-want basis.
Hobby holes
As well as indulging our penchant for delicious delicacies, an increasing number of cafes are geared up towards supporting our hobbies.
Dan Pye and Lindsey Brown based a whole business on their passion - comic books.
The Dark Matter Cafe in Durham is a place for comic fans, gamers and lovers of all thing nerd.
"It's been a longstanding ambition for both of us to open a cafe and we both share a love for comics and games," said Mr Pye.
"We know how cluttered the world is with cafes, especially Durham, so we thought, 'why don't we put these two together?' and they can support each other.
"Business is great, it's growing all the time."
Customers at Thirsty Meeples in Oxford can choose from more than 2,000 board games to play while they enjoy their refreshments.
While some restaurants have a sommelier to help people find the perfect wine, Thirsty Meeples, which opened two years ago, has a team of gurus to help guide visitors through their gaming choices.
"Cafe culture has grown in the last 15 to 20 years; just walking around Oxford you will find all sorts from high street names to small artisan coffee sellers," said manager Simon Read.
"A lot of people have an idea of what they are looking for because they know what they like.
"They are asking for very specific things, and the growing number of cafes are answering that."
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What are they really fighting over? Are Labour's two rival establishments - Corbyn's backers and the rest, really spending hours and hours and hours discussing the merits and drawbacks of elections to the shadow cabinet?
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Laura KuenssbergPolitical editor@bbclaurakon Twitter
Did it actually take six-and-a-half hours to agree that the Scottish and Welsh representatives on the National Executive Committee should get full voting rights? (This may in time become important, as those representatives are less likely to back Corbyn than other newly elected members).
How long will they argue over the seating at the party's conference next week, after the expected victory of Jeremy Corbyn on Saturday?
Frankly, it's not the details of today's tortuous discussions that matter, but a much bigger question that to many in the party seems almost impossible to answer. How on earth do the factions in the Labour Party come together now, or even co-exist?
Growing party
It's easy to forget how extraordinary the situation really is. Last summer, Jeremy Corbyn pulled off an extraordinary political feat, expanding the Labour electorate, bringing in thousands of new members to the party.
In a few short months he went from a total outsider, treated almost as a mascot for the left, to the victor in the contest, to the astonishment of most of the party's MPs.
Month after month after month, MPs became more and more critical of his performance until ultimately more than 170 of them expressed no confidence in him, including MPs from all wings of the party.
With some on the left, like Lisa Nandy, or those who campaigned alongside Mr Corbyn on some issues, like Andy Slaughter, withdrawing their support, more in sadness than in anger, the brutal truth for his team is that the vast majority of his MPs just don't think he is up to the job.
But in that same period of time, he has repeated that same political feat, attracting more, and more and more members to the party, very often explicitly to support him, growing the Labour Party to become one of the largest in Europe.
That's likely to see him land a very comfortable majority when the leadership result is announced in Liverpool on Saturday.
Healing process
Indeed in a revealing answer in an interview earlier today, the man who has tried to oust him, Owen Smith, almost seemed to concede that his efforts have failed.
He warned: "We can choose to pull ourselves together, to unite the party to get back to being seen as a credible alternative to the Tories or we can do what we did in the 1980s - continue to be divided, fall apart and give the Tories a free run for 18 years or more."
"That's been my deepest concern both before, during and I fear after this contest."
He won't quite admit it, but his words and body language suggest he knows it is over.
Minds are therefore turning to how things will be different under Corbyn the second time around.
When the link between the leader and the vast bulk of the parliamentary party is broken, how to fix it to create an effective opposition?
When so many MPs feel under attack from the leader's supporters, how can they reconcile? What will it take to soothe the anger of many particularly new Labour supporters who feel MPs have betrayed them and Mr Corbyn?
Today's meeting at the NEC was an attempt, particularly through deputy leader Tom Watson's proposals, to find a formal way to start the healing process.
But after eight hours of talks the committee had agreed only to hold more talks. If that's a sign of how hard Labour will find it to come to together after Mr Corbyn's expected victory it doesn't look good.
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A bid for more than £10m to improve broadband services in East Sussex has been submitted by the county council.
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East Sussex County Council's plan, which aims to improve services in rural areas, has been sent to the government.
The county council will be investing £15m in the plan which will also help those living in areas where broadband is not commercially viable.
Peter Jones, leader of the council, said he wanted everyone in East Sussex to have access to reliable broadband.
He said: "Making this technology available throughout East Sussex is absolutely vital for all our residents and small businesses."
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Political bickering has long been a roadblock to getting big things done in the US but a grassroots movement getting few headlines could yet herald a new American age of change.
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By Tom GeogheganBBC News, Blue Earth, Minnesota
A green giant in a loin cloth would seem an unlikely indicator for what some describe as a revolution under way in the heart of America.
But the Jolly Green Giant statue on Highway 169 in rural Minnesota wears a 48-inch (1.2m) smile for a reason.
Accompanied by the slogan Dream Big, he typifies a sense of hope and renewal in the nearby city of Blue Earth that is quietly being echoed across parts of the US.
As the country continues its long recovery from recession, there are signs that a much deeper shift is happening at a local level, the seeds of which were sown years ago.
Indicators far more subtle than job numbers suggest a flourishing of entrepreneurship, collaboration and problem-solving, away from the gaze of national media.
After five years spent visiting dozens of towns, The Atlantic writer James Fallows and his wife Deborah have written a book Our Towns which paints a portrait of renewal, a story at odds with the well-documented gridlock of higher levels of government.
Fallows says that in several areas - civic engagement, returning talent, growth of tech start-ups, downtown revitalisation, an openness to immigrants and thriving libraries - local America seems to be flourishing.
He's not alone. Another book called The New Localism says a growing number of US cities are addressing the problems of post-industrial America in increasingly imaginative and flexible ways - succeeding where bigger government fails.
There is also optimism from the world of tech. After visiting communities in the heart of the country, in a huge drive to help entrepreneurs, internet pioneer Steve Case, co-founder of AOL, says the future looks bright.
"I believe that we are entering the Third Wave of the internet, a period in which entrepreneurs will leverage technology to revolutionise major sectors of the economy - healthcare, financial services, agriculture and others," he says.
These deep, structural changes and bursts of creativity appear to be especially evident in cities and towns in the Midwest, long derided as "flyover country".
Now it's more like "flying back home country" as thousands of people return to their hometowns from bigger coastal cities, bringing with them new ideas and a drive to succeed.
Let's take a closer look.
Bouncing back
While the prairies that surround it are characteristically flat, Blue Earth - population 3,300 - has experienced more than a few bumps in the road.
The agricultural crisis of the 1980s caused by ballooning debt and falling incomes led to bankruptcies and an exodus from rural communities. This was especially felt in the Midwest and Blue Earth. Then out-of-town superstores and online shopping came along.
It was a succession of body blows for Blue Earth, which is named after the traces of blue residue found in the banks of its river. The town lost a fifth of its population.
But the feeling now on Main Street, where boarded up premises are slowly being replaced by new businesses, is that it is bouncing back.
College graduates are coming home again in their 20s and 30s, rather than heading to the big cities, reversing the years-long talent exodus. And some are returning with new business ideas and a determination to revive the fortunes of the town.
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One resident who never went away is Blue Earth's green and famous 60ft (18m) landmark. The town has long had a Green Giant canning factory producing the famous tins of peas and corn, and the giant was erected in the 1970s to entice drivers into the town from the interstate highway.
It worked - the visitors' book near the statue suggests people from all over the world have dropped by for a photo.
But very few drove a further five minutes into the city centre.
So the change about to be wrought at the giant's feet could be a portent for the exciting future of the town itself.
A few yards from the giant's size 78 shoes is a construction site where a welcome centre is being built to showcase the town. The hope is that in future people will do more than stop for a selfie.
And like a trail of breadcrumbs in a Brothers Grimm fairytale, 16 smaller statues of the giant's younger sidekick Little Green Sprout are being designed and made by local artists, and placed around town.
Main Street is fresh from a facelift - the council reconfigured the street and offered grants to businesses to improve their shopfronts.
There is a new police station, a new water tower and swimming pool. In the works is a housing development targeting young families and a new sewage plant.
The new "British" roundabouts on the highway right under the giant's nose are another sign of investment, this time by the state of Minnesota.
But they stoked such confusion at first that "there wasn't three days when there wasn't a truck stuck on the top of it", according to one local.
One woman's vision
No such disorientation about the most ambitious plan to invigorate Main Street.
If one woman's vision comes to fruition, three abandoned buildings known as The Three Sisters will be converted into a space for artists, tech entrepreneurs, a coffee shop, wine bar, Italian restaurant and bakery.
Janie Hanson, 36, grew up on a nearby farm, and her family instilled in her the benefit of hard work and philanthropy.
She left the area to pursue three degrees, including an Ivy League university education in New York. But she has returned to Minnesota and wants to help transform her hometown, using her non-profit organisation Connect The Grey.
"I hope this project will be a catalyst to invigorate the community," she says. "I want to provide the platform for people with undiscovered talent the opportunity to pursue it."
The council agreed on Monday to give Hanson's $2.5m (£1.9m) plan the go-ahead, and to sell the site to her for $1.
There are many others brimming with ideas in Blue Earth, many of whom came back from elsewhere with a determination to reinvent and survive.
There's John, a construction manager who bought a derelict building on Main Street and made it into a Norwegian brewery, after teaching himself how to do it.
Graphic designer Becki opened a new studio and art gallery that also sells high-end wool yarn and she holds weekly "stitch and bitch" nights for women.
Food blogger Stacie left Blue Earth to study nutrition and returned to live two blocks from Main Street, but now wants to start healthy living classes for local people.
Dietician Brooke married a professional ice hockey player and lived in Czech Republic, Germany and France, but has moved back and set up her own business.
And Bruce has his furniture store at the northern end of Main Street, with a cafe adjoining. If you're wondering why his vast space has some strangely curved walls, it's because it used to be a skating rink and a bowling alley, another change borne of survival as the town's population shrank.
The can-do spirit
Their qualities could not be more at odds with the image conveyed by national politics.
Year after year, the US government fights over how to fix the immigration system or overhaul the ailing healthcare system. It is unable to repair the country's decrepit roads and bridges. And it has to shut down when it can't agree on a budget.
Surveys suggest Americans believe political gridlock in Washington has even hurt the US economy. And economists don't disagree.
But two books published in the last few weeks say American cities, big and small, are filling the gap, getting things done in a way the authors believe could spark a new economic resurgence.
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Fallows is convinced the country at a local level is in a state of renewal that defies the predominant narrative of political dysfunction and inaction.
His book reveals a proliferation of experiments and adaptations in cities like Holland in Michigan and Sioux Falls in South Dakota that cause him to think America has become "more like itself again".
Serious though the country's problems are, he says, the future is brighter than you would ever guess from national news coverage which fixates on the "trench warfare" of politics.
Parts of the nation are flourishing, he says, as distinctly American qualities come to the fore.
"The fundamental American bargain, for better and worse, has been a belief in fluidity, mobility, departure from convention, a willingness to overturn tradition," he says.
"This bias in American history is why the American countryside and cityscape looks less elegant than the long-protected pastureland of England or the villages of France. It's also been a crucial part of the openness and opportunity of the society, in cultural ways as well as economic."
He recognises that his country has fallen short of - and even contradicted - these ideals at times in its history, and the country still has immense challenges to overcome.
But the vibrancy of local America is an untold story, says Fallows, partly because there is a natural scepticism in the media and an inclination when visiting towns to always ask people about the national political drama.
In Blue Earth, the city council members do not even govern as Democrats or Republicans.
And political parties were never mentioned in conversation.
People seemed to be universally happy about where the town is heading, while pointing out the things they think it desperately needs - healthy food options, more things to do at night, more "life" on Main Street.
"I really do feel that there's a resurgence right now," says Chuck Hunt, managing editor of the weekly newspaper, the Faribault County Register.
"I can't pinpoint one thing but the city council has helped, it's progressive and aggressive."
Waiting for cavalry
The renewal of town and city centres across the US is accelerating now, says Patrice Frey of Main Street America, a programme which helps to breathe life into commercial areas. It says it has generated $75bn in public and private investment since 1980.
How cities are rolling up their sleeves and getting things done is the subject of New Localism, a book co-authored by Bruce Katz of the Brookings Institution.
"For the past 40 years, we have seen an evolution of urban problem-solving that's becoming more sophisticated and more impactful with every passing year," he says.
This "localism" first emerged in the 1980s, he says, when cities began to realise that the "cavalry wasn't coming" from federal and state government, and they were going to have to tackle their problems on their own.
City leaders are discovering that problem-solving from the bottom up - in partnerships with others from the worlds of business, technology and education - is more democratic and effective, says Katz.
The 20th Century was very much about hierarchical systems that were segmented and bureaucratic, he says, while the 21st Century is going to be "networked, distributed and led by cities".
Instead of a decision made in Washington and delivered by a government department in the form of a one-size-fits-all policy, there might be a list of possible solutions from - for example - a collaboration between a mayor's office, a university and a local enterprise group.
This trend is accelerating and moving outside the US, says Katz. In his book, Copenhagen, Hamburg and Kings Cross in London are held up as good examples.
It comes at a time when a new generation of leaders - with the retirement of baby boomers - is coming to the fore, according to Pete Peterson of the school of public policy at Pepperdine University in California. These millennials are more collaborative, he says, and want to create a new narrative from what they see at the national level.
Kansas boom
Blue Earth does not have to look to Copenhagen for inspiration.
Kansas City, 380 miles (611km) south in Missouri, has seen a tech boom, a massive investment in the downtown and the installation of high-speed internet, courtesy of Google Fiber.
The story of the city's reinvention began 20 years ago with a huge cash injection in the downtown, says Mike Mayer of Cushman & Wakefield, who has negotiated leases in the city worth nearly $2bn.
First Fridays began as a monthly attraction to showcase the city's growing arts scene, and that now brings 10,000 people to the city. The $100m KC Streetcar, a light rail system, opened in 2016 and that gave the city a sense of pride and helped to attract millennials.
A new $323m convention centre with 800 hotel rooms is due to open in 2020. Six years later, this sports-mad city could be hosting World Cup soccer matches. More and more outside money is pouring in, and the city's success is finally getting attention nationwide.
"There's still some pleasant surprise about the momentum here. It's a tad under the radar. They [investors] think it's a city of barbecues and jazz, and they come here and see it's got more legs," says Mayer.
One of the driving forces has been the Kauffman Foundation, which focuses on projects that encourage entrepreneurship and support education.
Matt Bramlette left a career in advertising to set up his own company three years ago - Mid Coast Modern sells handmade and home goods, with the support of local artists. The name is a pointed reference - typically, people get all their cool stuff from the east and west coasts, he says.
Having lived in Kansas City nearly all his life, Bramlette has seen it go from a "ghost-town" to one that's heading in the same direction as Portland, Oregon, or Austin, Texas.
He says the city has fostered an environment that is hugely supportive of local entrepreneurs, with lots of networking opportunities and a university six-week class for start-ups.
"Because there are so many entrepreneurs here, there is a sense of community that a bigger city may lack. We even support stores that are competitors and hope they do the same for us."
It helps that there is so much enthusiasm for locally made goods. "I'm not sure we could have survived without the local pride." Helped no end by the Royals winning baseball's World Series three years ago, he adds.
Exciting times ahead
There is no doubt there's a boom going on in small and midsized cities, especially away from the coasts, says leading investor and entrepreneur Steve Case.
He has visited 38 cities across the US with his company Revolution as it helps people with bright ideas to build their businesses, and he's seen "exciting progress" in each one.
The return of individuals from coastal cities to places where they grew up - the boomerang effect - is part of that, he says.
"Due to the renaissance occurring in rising cities, tech talent that previously saw Palo Alto or New York City as the only places where they could be successful are instead finding that they're able to launch and scale their companies with less overhead and a lower cost of living between the coasts."
How far can this go? A new book by photographer Niko Kallianiotis about communities in Pennsylvania provides a sharp reminder that the recovery is leaving many behind.
The challenges facing the US
But Bruce Katz sees an enormous opportunity in the growing strength of progressively minded cities to lower the achievement gap across racial, ethnic and class lines.
An "opportunity zone" tax incentive in the new tax law will entice investors and focus minds on upgrading the skills of young adults in deprived neighbourhoods, he says. The move enables states to designate low-income neighbourhoods and qualify them for favourable capital gains treatment.
"Mayors and their allies will leverage these private investments for dramatic effect, not just on economic growth but on economic growth that brings more and more lower-income residents into the labour force.
"So we are about to see a burst of institutional innovation and private investment in the US which will take New Localism to a whole other level."
Exciting times.
There is very little trace of revolution on Main Street in Blue Earth, however, where the only movement one Thursday afternoon is the flutter of the American flags.
But the seeds of change are here, and in the town's cafe, Brooke Ziegler Hussey explains how.
"In small-town America you find the opposite of the problems of big government. They want to work together and help each other here. That's a huge difference."
Yes, Blue Earth has a long way to go on a path back to prosperity but like America, baby steps can lead to giant strides.
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A 22-year-old man has been charged with causing death by dangerous driving after a woman died in a crash in Newport on Friday.
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The Newport man faces other charges, including theft of a vehicle and driving with excess alcohol.
Xana Doyle, 19, from Newport, died after a silver Toyota Avensis ended up on its roof on Usk Way just after 07:00 GMT. A 15-year-old girl was also hurt.
The man is due appear before Newport magistrates on Monday.
A 21-year-old man, who was also arrested in connection with the incident, has been released with no further action, said Gwent Police.
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A man has been remanded in custody charged with four offences after a burglary at a gun shop in Sheffield.
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Andrew Coy, 33, of Eldon Court, Sheffield, faces charges of aggravated burglary, burglary, possession of a shotgun and possession of a firearm.
A 38-year-old man and a woman, 31, arrested over the break-in at Hardy's Gunsmiths on Alderson Road on Friday have been released under investigation.
Sheffield magistrates remanded Mr Coy to appear at the crown court on 4 May.
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Hundreds of people have been evacuated from the Derbyshire town of Whaley Bridge after part of a dam collapsed. So what has happened at Toddbrook Reservoir, and how safe are Britain's dams?
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By Caroline LowbridgeBBC News
How does the dam work?
Toddbrook Reservoir has what is known as an earth dam.
Richard Coackley, former president of the Institution of Civil Engineers, said the structures, also referred to as earthfill or embankment dams, feature:
What went wrong at Toddbrook?
Heavy rainfall caused water levels in the reservoir to rise and start flowing over the auxiliary - or emergency - spillway.
The structure failed and was partly eroded away by water flowing over it.
Alan Warren, chairman of the British Dam Society, said the cause was unclear.
"We don't know whether the concrete was inadequate or whether there was some problem underneath those concrete slabs which means the slabs fell into a void that had been forming underneath," he said.
"Maybe the joints in the slabs weren't properly sealed, and water was getting in through the joints."
Mr Coackley said photos suggested water had washed away soil beneath the slabs but the clay core was still intact.
"That's why the dam is still secure there at this stage," he said.
How many dams do we have?
There are about 2,000 dams in England and Wales and about 800 in Scotland, according to Mr Coackley.
They have various owners and serve a range of purposes, he said.
"Water companies providing drinking water are major ones, then there are reservoirs providing water supplies to the original canal system.
"There are other dams just for fishing and there are other dams just for sailing and water sports. Other dams are to provide water for agriculture."
Toddbrook's dam was built in the 1830s to create the reservoir, providing hydraulic power and water for the canal system.
It still provides that water and is owned by the Canal and River Trust.
Mr Coackley said Toddbrook helped to create wealth for Whaley Bridge before goods could be transported by road, and was still important for tourism and the local economy.
Who makes sure dams are safe?
All reservoirs in England and Wales with a capacity above 25,000 cubic metres above ground level must comply with the Reservoirs Act.
Every dam must have a supervising civil engineer and an inspecting civil engineer to file annual safety reports to Defra, Mr Coackley said.
"That's part of an Act of Parliament that goes back 100 years."
The Canal and River Trust said the annual inspection of Toddbrook Reservoir in November was "absolutely fine".
This coincided with an independent inspection taking place every 10 years, and this was fine, too.
"Our engineers also inspect the reservoir twice-weekly and this is how we picked up the problem," said a spokeswoman.
Scotland has its own, separate Reservoirs Act, which requires owners to file safety reports with the Scottish Environment Protection Agency.
How often do dams fail?
Mr Coackley said failures were "very unusual indeed".
Prof Nigel Wright, a civil engineer and expert in flood risk management, said the last such evacuation in the UK was in 2007, when cracks appeared in the dam at Ulley Reservoir, near Rotherham, following heavy rain.
A new spillway was later built to replace the original which collapsed during the floods.
"Since that, the government has insisted that a lot of dams have been reanalysed to check what the danger is and come up with plans for evacuation if necessary," said Prof Wright, of Nottingham Trent University.
According to an Environment Agency report, the last time anyone died due to a dam disaster in the UK was in 1925, when two dams burst, killing 16 people in the north Wales village of Dolgarrog.
That led to improved construction requirements under the Reservoirs Act, introduced in 1930 and updated in 1975.
The UK's worst-ever dam disaster was the Great Sheffield Flood of 1864, which claimed at least 240 lives.
Elsewhere in the world, dam disasters still lead to major loss of life. In January, 300 people died in a mudslide after a dam collapsed near Brumadinho in Brazil.
Mr Warren, of the British Dam Society, said the Whaley Bridge incident was similar to one at Oroville in California in 2017.
"A spillway was damaged, then the auxiliary spillway came into operation and there was erosion on the auxiliary spillway which meant they had to evacuate people downstream," he said.
How safe are people living near dams?
While the failure of a dam could potentially kill hundreds or thousands of people, Mr Coackley said regular checks and maintenance, together with emergency plans, should prevent this.
"There are lots of people living below these dams and they are as safe as you can get," he said.
"It's not a disaster yet. Everything has gone according to plan with the Environment Agency and the emergency services all working with the inspecting engineer on what will be a pre-arranged plan.
"Every reservoir and dam has one of these plans in case of an emergency."
Prof Wright said the evacuation was a precaution, but the right thing to do.
"There's always a chance that you will move people and then nothing will happen, but that's much better than not moving them and then something happens," he said.
Mr Coackley said engineers elsewhere would be looking at the implications of Toddbrook.
"There will be more checks. Dam engineers will be noting what's going on," he said.
"It's really important as an engineer to analyse why this has happened and make sure all of the other dams are safe."
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The Queensferry Crossing between Edinburgh and Fife had to be closed because of the danger of falling ice. Bridge authorities blamed a "unique set of weather conditions". So, does this problem have a solution?
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By Steven BrocklehurstBBC Scotland News
Bridges around the world have struggled with snow and ice falling from the towers for years but the modern cable-stayed bridges give more opportunity for ice to accumulate and then fall on to vehicles below.
In Denmark, the Oresund Bridge has had to close numerous times under similar circumstances to the ones that shut Scotland's £1.35bn Queensferry Crossing.
Does Canada have the answer?
The Uddevalla Bridge in Sweden and the second Severn Crossing in south-west England have had similar problems.
In Canada, the Port Mann Bridge in Vancouver developed its own solution.
It releases "collars" or metal chains down the length of the suspension cables to clear ice accumulations.
The system is said to be largely successful but it relies on the collars being correctly operated and manually released at the right time.
Mark Arndt, of Queensferry Crossing operators Amey, said he would be concerned that the chain method from Canada could damage the 70km of cables on the Scottish bridge.
Transport Scotland, the government agency responsible for the crossing, said they had been looking at solutions from around the world but the problems they were experiencing were specific to the weather conditions and the particular design of the crossing.
They insisted "best practice from international experts is that human monitoring is the best available resource for this issue".
Is heating the cables a problem solver?
Prof Christos Georgakis, from the department of engineering at Aarhus University in Denmark told BBC Radio Scotland's Good Morning Scotland programme: "Ice is a very difficult problem to deal with."
He explained: "We have tried in the past many different solutions, coatings on cables, heating systems, even helicopters to come and try to blow all the snow and ice off with downwash, but it is a very difficult problem."
Prof Georgakis has done extensive research into the phenomenon of ice forming at the top of bridges.
He said that recently a solution which may be a little "counter-intuitive" had been suggested.
The idea was to create a cable system that would "retain" the ice instead of pushing it away.
The professor said that putting steel mesh or small plastic fingers on the outside of the bridge cables would help "grip" the ice and keep it for longer.
"The purpose of that is to help the ice to melt," he said. "The sun's rays will come out and the ice will melt and when it falls it will fall as water or as small pieces of ice, it won't be dangerous."
Prof Georgakis said there was a sharing of information among bridge operators around the world but it was a very slow process.
"And, of course, everyone within the field wants to find their own solution, the one that fits them best," he said.
His own research was at the point where he understood what works and what does not, Prof Georgakis said, but everyone wanted to try to find their own solution.
Did bridge designers not realise ice would be an issue?
Asked why he thought the bridge designers did not anticipate the ice problem, he said he would assume they thought the probability was very low and there was not the need for any kind of comprehensive solution.
Earlier this week, eight vehicles suffered damage to windscreens as a result of chunks of ice falling from the suspension cables, forcing the authorities to close the bridge.
Scotland's Transport Secretary Michael Matheson said sensors would be installed on the bridge to act as an early warning of ice accumulations.
Mr Matheson said it was worth keeping in mind that the bridge had only closed once in two-and-a-half years and was much more resilient than the old Forth Road Bridge, which was frequently closed by high winds.
Ice build-up of this kind has not been an issue on the other Scottish cable-stayed bridges, Erskine on the Clyde and Kessock, near Inverness.
Mr Matheson also pointed out that the ice accumulation was not a problem during the so-called Beast from The East, one of the worst weather events to hit the country in years.
He said it was a very "limited set of circumstances" that led to the problem.
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Cameroonian activist Andre Blaise Essama has been on a decades-long mission to purge his country of colonial-era symbols, long before the issue came to international prominence in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests.
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By Dickens OleweBBC News
His main target has been French World War Two hero Gen Philippe Leclerc in the country's biggest city, Douala.
"I have decapitated Leclerc's head seven times and toppled the statue at least 20 times," Mr Essama told the BBC.
"I use my bare hands... but I make an incantation to the ancestors first," he said.
His aim is to replace them with Cameroonian and other African heroes, but he will make an exception for those who campaigned for "the good of humanity".
He is especially keen on erecting a statue of Diana, the late Princess of Wales.
"Diana was against racism and she stood for humanity. We loved her here in Cameroon," Mr Essama said.
Mr Essama has also targeted a statue of Gustav Nachtigal, who arrived in Cameroon in 1884 to establish a German empire.
During World War One, British and French troops forced the Germans out, later splitting the German-occupied territory between them.
Seven heads restored
The authorities see his activities as vandalism, arguing that African heroes can be celebrated without removing colonial symbols.
Mr Essama has been imprisoned several times for cutting the head off Gen Leclerc's statue - serving up to six months at a time.
Sometimes he has avoided a jail term by paying fines, with the money mostly raised by his supporters in Cameroon and in the diaspora.
Each time he has damaged Gen Leclerc's statue in the main square in Douala, the authorities have restored it.
With one hand on hip, the other holding a walking stick, the French hero stands on a plinth in front of a curved stone relief depicting the French World War Two military arsenal, including tanks and planes.
It was erected by the French colonisers in 1948, long before Cameroon became independent in 1960.
'Seen as a god in France'
In France, Gen Leclerc is celebrated for his role in rallying troops in the 1940s in France's then-colonies to fight the German occupation.
"Leclerc is the great hero who helped liberate France... so the French regard him as a god," a history professor at the UK's Oxford University, Robert Gildea, told the BBC.
But he was unpopular in Cameroon, retired Cameroonian academic Prof Valere Epee said.
"Cameroonians didn't like him because he seemed not to care for the people.
"He was not like French President Charles de Gaulle, who visited Cameroon twice, and whom people seem to have an affection for."
Gen Leclerc died in a plane crash in Algeria in 1947, three years after the liberation of Paris. Thousands of people lined the streets in the French capital to pay tribute to him.
Several memorial plaques have been installed in his honour in France, two streets in Paris have been named after him and a military tank, still in service, bears his name.
'Our heroes first'
His venerated status does not impress Mr Essama.
"He is not our hero," says the 44-year-old activist, who is a computer science graduate.
"Gen Leclerc has come to represent the erasure of Cameroonian colonial memory and replacing it with a French one."
Mr Essama has collected seven heads of Gen Leclerc over the years, and has occasionally taken them on to the streets to "sensitise Cameroonians about the country's history".
He says he was inspired by Cameroonian nationalist Mboua Massock, who once graffitied the general's statue with the words: "Our own heroes and martyrs first."
"We sing in our anthem, 'Oh Cameroon land of our ancestors.' How is it that our ancestors are not represented in public spaces?"
In 1991, Cameroon's President Paul Biya signed a declaration to rehabilitate the memory of the country's heroes who had been denigrated because of their role during the fight for independence.
"Not much has been done since the law was signed," Mr Essama said.
French hero 'now behind bars'
A history professor at the University of South Africa, Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni, says that statues and monuments "have become soft targets in the struggle against decolonisation".
"The Europeans were thinking they were the only people on earth and, therefore, there was emptiness outside Europe, which was waiting to be discovered," he told the BBC, quoting the late American anthropologist James Blaut's views on Eurocentrism.
"If you follow that logic: you discover a place, you name it, eliminate what you find there, then you conquer, then you own it, and statues are symbols of ownership," he said.
"In the former colonies, the statues mean that the colonisers have not repented for the sins they committed against the local people but their presence in the home country means that this is the conqueror of the world, this is our hero."
He dismisses the argument that statues should be protected because of their historical significance.
"If your statue is history, the indigenous people are saying: 'But you wrote your history on top of my history. It is overshadowing our own histories.'"
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Prof Ndlovu-Gatsheni said the targeting of statues was part of a multifaceted campaign by Africans.
"There are those who topple statues, others want to stop the use of West Africa's CFA currency [which is pegged to the euro], others are pushing for reparations, all these are part of the struggle against the empire."
As for Mr Essama, he is now less focussed on decapitating statues, turning his attention to fundraising to build statues of Cameroonian heroes and calling for reparations for colonial-era crimes.
So far his advocacy group, Essama Hoo Haa, has helped install two statues.
One is of Samuel Mbappé Léppé, considered Cameroon's best ever footballer, "better than Roger Milla and Samuel Eto'o", Mr Essama says.
The other is of John Ngu Foncha, a former prime minister who championed the cause of greater autonomy for Cameroon's mainly English-speaking regions.
Gen Leclerc's statue does still occupy Mr Essama's mind, though it has become more difficult to target because it is now sealed off and has guards protecting it.
"He is in prison," Mr Essama said with a wry chuckle.
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Heating your home with gas is getting cheaper, because there has been a rapid shift to multiple supply sources. The UK has neglected to invest in storage, and with demand exceptionally low, it is running out of export options. Older North Sea fields could be shut down permanently, except that the decommissioning costs make that an unattractive option.
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Douglas FraserBusiness/economy editor, Scotland
The squealing sound you may be able to hear is from energy suppliers, as their regulator screws down profits with a tighter cap on default prices.
Ofgem says they should pass on an average £84 per year in cuts to their standard variable tariff, which is the limbo where inert customers go, and which used to be highly profitable.
It cites the wholesale price of gas as having fallen. And how!? So what's been going on?
We've heard a lot about oil, since the market tanked at the start of March. Having gone from the $50+ range to below $20, it's now back in the mid-40s, having caused corporate carnage on the way.
Oil, and the benchmark Brent crude price, is treated as a proxy for the state of the world economy. It gets attention because it lubricates the economic machinery It's movable and tradable anywhere.
Some of those who own it have become filthy rich: some have frittered away their wealth: others have been broken by "the resource curse" in which it crowds out other sectors.
Controlling the taps
Gas isn't like that. It has long been the commodity tied in to the pipeline network, putting customers at the mercy of suppliers, and anyone along the pipeline who controls a tap.
For many, that supplier has been Russia. It has used its control over supply to play power politics with its dependent neighbours. That has driven the gas industry to diversify.
Pipelines now criss-cross Europe and the Mediterranean. Algeria, Norway and the waters west of Shetland are substitutes for Siberia. The ones linking Britain across the North Sea flow in both directions depending on UK needs: recently they've been outbound from Britain.
Russia continues to be an important supplier, and Germany's support for a new pipeline has caused friction with Americans, who would prefer to reduce dependency further.
America, which used to supply gas only to its own people and neighbours, is now a major world gas supplier, pumping liquified natural gas onto ocean-going tankers, rendering the gas market, ironically, much more liquid.
Britain also gets much of its gas from Qatar, where Asia also sources LNG. The ocean-going tanker option has opened up possibilities for huge new reserves discovered off the coast of Africa.
Powered down
So there are abundant new sources of supply, and for much of the year, demand is falling a long way short of that. Milder European winters have reduced the need for heating, and over the next few years, there should be a big shift to renewable heat.
Covid-19 shut down much of industry, and with the lights out on commercial buildings from offices to shops, the electricity-generating sector had far less need of gas.
One answer to this should be storage. Other countries have invested in giant tanks, to ensure security of supply. The UK, with one of the biggest gas markets in Europe, has not seen the need.
It had storage, in vast urban gasometers, built to store the "town gas" derived from coal before the North Sea began supplying in 1970. But many have been dismantled.
Security of supply is assured by having production offshore. In the Irish Sea, some old, non-producing fields have been used to flex the system, pumping gas under the seabed and extracting it when required. But the main facility, called Rough, was closed three years ago.
According to gas market analyst Hadrien Collineau, of energy consultant Wood Mackenzie, Britain runs close to being full up. So is Ireland. With inventories high across Europe, the lack of demand could force cutbacks in production.
Texan scrubland
While much gas is supplied through forward contracts, the spot price shows how unbalanced the market has become, and why storage has become more important. In winter, the price can be around $4 per million thermal units, but as summer approached, it fell close to $1.
Earlier this year, it meant American cargoes were crossing the Atlantic to supply Europe at a loss. Qatari cargoes were offloading into European markets.
That supply could have been re-directed into the Pacific market, and supplied to Japan, a big customer for natural gas. But Covid-19 had hit the Asian economy, and demand had fallen away there too.
So as tankers were tied up, so too the number of gas rigs in the scrubland of Texas fell sharply as well. That is one of the ways the market balances itself - with a cull of US investment, for which lenders had become over-exposed.
Fossil fuelled
Could it also mean an impact for the UK's offshore gas production?
Hadrien Collineau reckons the impact could be limited, as production costs are not high, even in ageing fields, compared with the cost of decommissioning them when capital is scarce.
The impact of low gas prices seems to be more likely to be felt in exploration. Gas and oil majors BP and Shell have written down the value of reserves by many billions of dollars, and exploratory drilling is down.
This is largely a recognition that fossil fuels are being replaced as an energy source, and 'integrated energy' companies need to shift in that direction.
Gas will continue to have a role in transition, and is now firmly established as the most efficient baseload supplier of power when the wind drops and the sun doesn't shine. At such low prices, it's helping to knock out much dirtier coal and lignite burning in central Europe.
But while many of us continue to depend on it for domestic heating, with bills falling, the transition from gas to electric or other, greener forms of heating will be hard to achieve through price signalling alone.
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Fashion designer Sir Paul Smith will unveil a blue plaque to one of the last firms making lace knitted scarves and shawls in the East Midlands.
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G.H Hurt & Son, based in Chilwell, Nottingham, are celebrating 100 years of trading.
The plaque commemorates George Henry Hurt and will be placed on the building he opened in 1912.
Nottingham was synonymous with lace and once had more than 130 lace factories, employing about 25,000 people.
Managing director Henry Hurt MBE said it was special celebrating the centenary during the Queen's Diamond Jubilee and the London Olympics.
The Mayor of Broxtowe, Margaret Handley, and Broxtowe MP Anna Soubry, will also attend the unveiling of the plaque at 14:00 BST.
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Plans to save about £24m and increase council tax by almost 5% have been approved by councillors.
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The £490m budget was backed by a full meeting of the Conservative-controlled Suffolk County Council by 45 votes to 17.
The rise breaks down as a 2.99% increase in general tax, with an additional 2% for adult social care.
It means an average band D council tax property owner will have to pay £1,242 a year.
Savings of £1.7m will also be made from resource management, as well as £240,000 from fire and public safety budgets.
The fire service savings would be achieved by the sharing of facilities with the police and ambulance services, the council said.
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Angelina Jolie underwent a preventive double mastectomy after doctors estimated she had an 87% chance of developing breast cancer. How was that figure calculated and how does it differ from other women's risk of getting the disease?
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By Ben CarterBBC News
Jolie's chances of developing breast cancer were so high because she inherited a mutated BRCA 1 gene from her mother, Marcheline Bertrand, who died of ovarian cancer at the age of 56.
The BRCA1 is present in everyone but only mutates in one in 1,000 people. Anyone with the mutation has a 50-80% chance of developing breast cancer.
But Jolie's risk figure was calculated to be even higher because of other factors, including family history.
"There are various computer programmes where you can input genetic information, family history and other things and it will calculate a figure, which is why she's got this very precise sounding number," says Dr Kat Arney, a senior science manager at Cancer Research UK.
But what are the chances of getting breast cancer if you don't have a mutated gene?
It is already "the top cancer in women both in the developed and the developing world", according to the World Health Organization - and in many countries, it's becoming more common.
Incidence increased in the UK by 90% between 1971 and 2010. It is also on the rise in the developing world.
This is partly explained by the fact that people are living longer and cancer is generally a disease that affects people in later life.
In the UK, the chance of developing breast cancer before the age of 30 is roughly 0.05% (one in 2,000). It goes up to 2% (one in 50) before the age of 50 and 7.7% (one in 13) before the age of 70.
However, it is after the age of 70 that the risk is highest. A third of all incidences of breast cancer occur in women aged over 70.
Overall, a woman living in the UK has a 12% chance of getting breast cancer during her lifetime. It's the same in the US.
But increasing longevity isn't the only reason for the high incidence of breast cancer.
"There is an increase in rates in younger women and it's for a number of reasons. We know that women's lifestyles are changing and being overweight and drinking a lot of alcohol is linked to breast cancer risk," says Arney.
Changes in reproductive habits are also a factor. According to Cancer Research UK, the relative risk of developing breast cancer is estimated to increase by 3% for each year an adult woman delays becoming a mother.
Women who breastfeed also reduce their risk. The longer a woman breastfeeds, the greater the protection. It's estimated that risk is reduced by 4% for every 12 months of breastfeeding.
This may explain why women in richer countries have a higher risk of breast cancer.
African women are four times less likely to get the disease because they have children at a younger age, have more of them and breastfeed them for longer.
On the other hand, recovery rates are higher in developed countries.
"Breast cancer survival rates [range] from 80% or over in North America, Sweden and Japan to around 60% in middle-income countries and below 40% in low-income countries," according the WHO.
But with the number of cases of breast cancer rising in the UK, and in many other countries, how many women are taking the dramatic decision that Angelina Jolie was faced with - to have a mastectomy?
The latest figures show that 18,000 operations were carried out in England in 2010/11. There are no official figures on how many of those were preventive but the figure is estimated to be between 5-10%.
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"What if all students spoke up about gun reform?"
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By Tom GerkenBBC UGC & Social News
This is the type of question being posed on social media by survivors of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas school shooting in Parkland, Florida that left 17 people dead.
A video posted by student Jaclyn Corin has been viewed over a million times as she asks politicians to "value children's lives, not dollars", and encourages others to pose "what if" questions of their own.
This follows the #NeverAgain movement, which made international headlines when Parkland student Emma Gonzalez gave an impassioned speech arguing for tougher gun controls.
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Fellow survivors of the school shooting have also uploaded videos on social media using the hashtag #WhatIf.
"What if politicians actually listened to the concerns of my generation?" asks Madie Leall in her video, adding: "What if civilians could not access assault weapons?"
Dylan Kraemer asks: "What if politicians stopped taking money from the NRA (National Rifle Association)?"
Other students across the United States have joined the debate by posting similar #WhatIf questions of their own. In Rob Anderson's tweet, he asks state legislators to "tax the heck out of gun manufacturers and gun sales".
Another user on Twitter asked for politicians to put children first:
But this has proved to be a point of contention, with pro-gun advocates posting #WhatIf questions of their own in response.
One person used the hashtag to defend the NRA.
A second Twitter user agreed, asking: "What if you mess with our rights to the point we have NO rights?"
One user countered the NRA argument by asking: "What if you clowns started using your brains and directing your grievance in the right place! The NRA has no authority in our government".
But other users were quick to argue that the NRA "has power because they have money".
The online debate led actor Mark Ruffalo to give his thoughts on #WhatIf.
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Beauty salons have been greatly affected by this year's pandemic. With the first Covid-19 vaccines now being administered, we speak to six industry professionals about how they have coped with 2020, and their hopes for the future.
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By Sarah FinleyBusiness reporter
Elizabeth Chandler says that after a tough year "the vaccine could be great for the industry".
She is the owner of London-based eyelash extension business - Elizabeth Chandler Lashes - whose clients include model Cara Delevingne, singer Nicole Scherzinger, fashion designers, and dancers on the TV show Strictly Come Dancing.
Like all UK beauty treatment businesses, she had to shut up shop in March, given the close face-to-face nature of much of her work.
"My income went to zero for six months," says Ms Chandler. "I built my business for 13 years, and I was unable to work for half a year. [Previously] I have never been out of work in my life."
In a bid to retain her clients Ms Chandler held weekly free Zoom tutorials, before finally reopening in August - only to have to shut again during England's second lockdown in November.
"Any mass vaccination programme will take a long time to roll out," she says. "But the tier system as it stands means we [in London, currently tier two] can all open and continue to work, which is wonderful."
In Wales, Poppy Johnson, a make-up artist in Bangor, Gwynedd, took her business Faces By Poppy online this year. She expects to continue with internet classes even after the pandemic has finally ended.
"As soon as the lockdown was announced I made the decision to pivot my business instead of pausing it," she says. "I needed to carry on working not only for my mental health, but to maintain the creativity and passion for what I do."
So she began offering weekly tutorials on Zoom to those who wanted to learn new make-up techniques. "I wanted to take the experience I would normally offer in the salon, online," says Ms Johnson.
As the lessons became popular she created an online subscription portal. For a one-off fee it gives customers access to make-up tutorials and product recommendations. She says she now has more than 250 people signed up.
Emma Appleby, who runs London-based skin clinic L'Atelier Aesthetics, has also embraced the commercial opportunities of online video conferencing.
Since the first lockdown she has used Zoom for consultations with her clients - giving them advice on their skin needs, then a personal prescription of products.
"The pandemic has meant we've had to pivot and engage our clients online," says Ms Appleby. "In these times you really do need think outside of the box."
Skincare specialist Katie White, owner of another London salon Re:lax, also went online during the first lockdown, but says customers took a while to get used to it.
"We went all in with our online offering, hosting paid and free facial massage, gua sha, rosacea, and [general] skincare workshops, online consultations and seminars," she says.
"Initially customers weren't keen as they thought we be open again soon. Once they realised this wasn't the case they were more receptive to our online presence."
Leslie Blair, chair of the British Association of Beauty Therapy & Cosmetology, says that 2020 has been "catastrophic" for the sector, but that vaccines will improve things.
New Economy is a new series exploring how businesses, trade, economies and working life are changing fast.
"Most industries stand to benefit from the vaccines, but naturally even more so those considered to be close contact businesses, such as hair and beauty," she says. "There will be dual benefit in terms of the impact it will have on the way in which their salons need to function, and in the confidence and peace of mind it will provide to the clients they serve.
"The vaccine will prove pivotal to a positive outlook for our industry for a variety of reasons - as mentioned already it will boost customer confidence - naturally resulting in increased bookings."
She adds: "It will also mean that a number of restrictions currently in place will ultimately be able to be eased - many of which have had a detrimental impact on the profitability of our businesses. These include staggered appointments, limitation on staff numbers, cost of PPE equipment, restrictions on treatments and who could be treated."
Susan Vaughan, boss of beauty salon SV Aesthetics, agrees vaccines offer "a little glimmer of hope that things are moving in the right direction".
"In the beauty industry we are face-to-face with our clients all day, every day, so if the vaccine ensures people feel safe and well protected, then I can see things slowly but surely going back to how things were prior to March.
"We will continue to wear our PPE and face masks, and sanitise the clinic after every client, to keep any risk as low as we can. But with the added protection of the vaccine I have high hopes for a thriving business year in 2021," adds Susan.
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Economic migrants from Africa have been coming to Portugal for more than 50 years but they have rarely encountered such challenging times. Two years into a programme of cuts and tax rises there are now fewer opportunities for both established residents and new arrivals.
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By Ian BrimacombeBBC World Service, Lisbon
Joao Dos Santos Neto has a family to support - and he is looking for work. The 44-year-old from the small African country of Sao Tome and Principe has plenty of experience - 19 years in construction.
He has his papers in order too. But right now he seems a broken man. He has been looking for months. He has two sons and a wife to feed - and he says he is beginning to lose hope.
"Before it was easier to get a job," he says, "but with the crisis it is very difficult. And even when we find a job we have a very low salary."
"I really don't think things are getting better. Probably they're getting worse."
Mr Neto lives in Cova da Moura - a vibrant but poor neighbourhood perched high on a hill in the outskirts, north-west of Lisbon. It was built illegally in the late 1970s by African migrants.
Today, more than 6,000 people from Portugal's former African colonies - three-quarters of them from Cape Verde - live here in cramped concrete breeze-block homes covered in graffiti.
The roads are wrecked and nests of wires hang from roof tops. This place might have more in common with areas of Nairobi or Rio than the grand squares and avenues of central Lisbon. Times here have never been easy - but these days they are particularly bad.
Portugal is in its third year of recession - it is the worst economic crisis since the 1970s. Two years ago the country took a 78bn-euro (£65bn) bailout from international lenders.
As part of the deal, it has to make 4bn euros of savings by the end of 2015. To meet tough lending criteria, the government has raised taxes, slashed spending and cut pay. That has resulted in record high unemployment, now at nearly 18%.
Piles of paperwork
It is difficult to know how many Afro-Portuguese live in Portugal. The Portuguese census does not ask people about their ethnicity. Some are here illegally, and many of those who arrived decades ago have since been nationalised and now have Portuguese families.
Most people come from Cape Verde and Angola. The official statistics from the Portuguese Border Agency say some 44,000 people from Cape Verde and some 21,000 from Angola live here. But the real figure is believed to be much higher.
"The problem for Portugal's African residents is that many of them work in two of the hardest hit industries - construction and domestic services," says Lieve Meersschaert, a board member of Moinho Da Juventude, an non-governmental organisation (NGO) in Cova da Moura.
"Men cannot find work right now, and the women have work, but they are not getting the same money," she says. "They used to work seven hours and now they have to work 10 hours for the same wage.
"Many of them have four or five children and they're not returning home until two in the morning. So it's very hard."
Compounding that is the fact many Afro-Portuguese lack the education and contacts to allow them to compete with others looking for jobs.
And there is an additional problem. Many Africans here do not have the right documentation. Some are long-standing residents who have never entered the system. Many have come to Portugal on a tourist visa and have overstayed.
It is Jokilson Pereiro's job to help these people here navigate the channels to get papers and find jobs legally. Piles of paperwork sit on his desk in his tiny office in Cova da Moura. Music from Guinea-Bissau wafts through the air.
"The problem is the system and the people who work in the system - bureaucracy is the problem," he says.
But 29-year-old Clemildo Barros Abreu says money is the real problem. He came here recently from Sao Tome and Principe. His landlord has agreed to waive his rent until he finds work, but his tiny apartment has no hot water. His work papers will cost him 475 euros. But he says he needs work before he can afford to buy them.
"There are two possibilities," he says. "I can get a good job with a contract and then it's easier to get the documents. Or, I'm going to try to do some illegal jobs to get the money and then pay for the documents."
'Feeling the brunt'
It is the illegal work that poses the biggest problem for the government, and makes it difficult for them to get a handle on the number of people out of work and needing help.
Susana Branco, Lisbon director at the Ministry of Solidarity and Social Security, says she has moved office workers back to front-line field work.
In fact, she says because of established networks and NGOs on the ground, there is still more help for African-Portuguese than many in the middle classes who have suddenly found themselves out of work.
Everyone is affected - "everyone, with no exception," she says.
"In the field I never saw people together working in the problematic neighbourhoods like I do now. I don't believe the most vulnerable are the most affected by the crisis."
But not everyone agrees.
"The situation for African Portuguese is worse than it is for the rest of the population," says Antonio Santos, an Angolan journalist with RTP Africa. "There is no money at the moment, no investment. The minorities are the first to feel the brunt of this crisis. The situation is tragic for everybody but especially for minorities."
The people of Cova da Moura are used to hardship. Thirty years ago, hundreds of residents were without running water, electricity, and sewers. It used to be that the struggle was part of the journey to a better life.
These days, though, the narrative has turned on its head. Booming African economies appear to be where the future is.
Numbers are hard to come by, but there is anecdotal evidence that some recent migrants are leaving Portugal. Antonio Santos says he is hearing Angolans are returning home to seek opportunities in the country's booming oil economy. Others say migrants are moving on to try their luck in the UK, where unemployment is lower.
Clemildo Barros Abreu has no such intentions. He plans to stay in Portugal as long as it takes to find work. "I'll stick it out," he says. But for increasing numbers of Afro-Portuguese, this country is no longer the land of opportunity.
Ian Brimacombe's special report can be heard on the BBC World Service.
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The Suzanne Pilley murder trial in Edinburgh has been hearing how police retraced a car journey to Argyll made by the accused.
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Her colleague and former lover David Gilroy drove his silver Vauxhall Vectra from the capital to Lochgilphead the day after she disappeared in May 2010.
He denies murdering Ms Pilley, 38, in Thistle Street or at another location.
After analysing CCTV evidence, police recreated the journey there and back three times.
They discovered Mr Gilroy had taken two hours longer than their average time each way.
And a comparison of fuel consumption suggested there were 124 miles unaccounted for.
The trial continues.
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Let's be honest, those crowds we used to see on Black Friday, with people cramming into shops at opening time and fighting over the latest bargain - they're not the most Covid-secure event, are they.
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By Rick KelseyNewsbeat reporter
Although the signs suggest Brits got over the Black Friday hype a few years ago.
Many shops are still expected to offer deals online for the pre-Christmas sales event today.
It's been a difficult year for lots of retailers, who will be hoping Black Friday - and its bigger cousin Cyber Monday - gives them a much-needed boost.
But this all comes with a health warning if you're buying online.
Amazon is struggling to prevent fake reviews which can mislead shoppers this Black Friday, according to Which?.
The consumer group looked at some of the most popular purchases, including tablets and phones, and found some review ratings were being manipulated.
Amazon responded to the claims saying it has clear policies that reviewers and sellers must stick to.
It says it will suspend, ban, and take legal action against those who break the rules.
One pair of headphones had 1,006 ratings and 4.8 stars despite only being on sale for six months - well above the average for an unknown brand.
As well as false comments, some sellers have also manipulated the star-rating system to persuade people into a purchase.
In the UK, Amazon is the dominant force with Black Friday shoppers.
Which? research found 34% of consumers planned to buy something there this Black Friday, compared to 16% at John Lewis and 7% at Currys PC World.
But fake reviews have been a problem on some of the biggest shopping sites including eBay, Facebook and TripAdvisor for years.
Other tactics included offering free gifts or vouchers in return for positive or five-star reviews - which is in breach of Amazon's selling policy.
Which? is also concerned about accounts being hacked to leave reviews, comments being transferred from different products and sellers pushing people to leave pictures.
There appears to have been a rise in the proportion of suspicious reviews on Amazon in the UK since March's coronavirus lockdown, according to analysis site ReviewMeta.
The site includes an online tool which checks for fakes and copies in a web address.
Their data suggests a 30% rise in the proportion of unnatural reviews on Amazon between March and August following the first coronavirus lockdown.
So how do we spot a fake review this Black Friday?
Which? has some simple tips for checking up on fake reviews.
A version of this article was originally published on 10 November 2020.
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Britain goes to the polls on 23 June to decide whether to leave the European Union. How much do you know about the different members of the EU? Take our quizzical tour of the 28 member states.
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Try another EU quiz - Strange claims, counter-claims (and a weird omen)
Find out more about the issues in the EU referendum:
The UK's EU vote: All you need to know
BBC News: EU Referendum
(Question picture credits - Getty Images - 9, 10, 11, 20, 23; iStock - 4, 5, 6, 15, 16, 17, 18, 21, 25, 26, 27, 28; Science Picture Library - 19; Alamy - 22, 24)
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An Aberdeen councillor who works abroad has resigned.
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Conservative Bridge of Don councillor Brett Hunt has written to the local authority's chief executive Angela Scott informing her of his decision.
In 2017 after being elected, Mr Hunt had insisted he was still able to carry out his duties despite increasing commitments to his job overseas.
The SNP's Sandy Stuart, 68, who also represented the Bridge of Don, died on Wednesday night.
No by-election date has yet been set.
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With the world gripped by the coronavirus pandemic it's been easy to lose track of what's happening with Brexit. Big changes will happen from 1 January, but the UK and the EU are running out of time to agree the new rules.
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By Tom EdgingtonBBC News
Here are nine significant moments from this year.
1. The UK leaves (31 January)
At 23:00 GMT on 31 January the UK officially left the EU - nearly four years after the public vote took place.
Brexit supporters celebrated in London's Parliament Square, while Prime Minister Boris Johnson vowed to bring the country together and "take us forward".
But the UK did not immediately cut all of its EU ties. The UK went into a transition period that meant continuing to follow EU rules until 31 December 2020.
The transition was to allow both sides some breathing space while further UK-EU talks take place. The outcome of these negotiations will determine the rules for the new UK-EU relationship - including on trade - which will start on 1 January 2021.
2. UK-EU trade talks start (2 March)
The new negotiations got under way in Brussels on 2 March.
Leading the talks for the UK was David Frost, who arrived with 100 advisers and government officials. At the opposite end of the table was Michel Barnier - the EU's chief Brexit negotiator.
The biggest issue was a trade deal - everything from lorries crossing borders to financial services rules. But there was plenty of other stuff to discuss - security co-operation and medicine safety being examples.
Both sides say they want to avoid tariffs, which are taxes on goods that cross a border. But the UK wants to set all of its own rules and the EU says it doesn't want changes to the rules that mean the UK has an unfair advantage.
3. EU says talks are 'going backwards, more than forwards' (21 August)
With the coronavirus crisis taking centre stage, little progress was made with the trade talks.
Two major sticking points emerged:
Frustration was growing on both sides and on 21 August Mr Barnier told a press conference that the chance of an EU-UK post-Brexit trade deal "seems unlikely" while Lord Frost said the EU had made things "unnecessarily difficult".
4. UK says it is not scared to walk away (6 September)
In a further sign that talks were in trouble, Lord Frost told the Mail on Sunday that the UK was not scared to walk away and urged the EU to "take our position seriously".
If talks do fail then charges - known as tariffs - would be applied to most goods which UK businesses send to the EU. That could make UK goods more expensive in the EU. Tariffs on EU goods coming into the UK would also be introduced.
Full border checks would also be needed and businesses have voiced their fears that this would cause long lorry queues at ports and lead to significant trade disruption around the country.
Both sides want to continue to trade with zero tariffs and not bring in too many extra checks - but that will require a trade deal. The UK also wants services - everything from accountancy to education - included in any deal.
5. UK admits its Brexit changes will 'break international law' (8 September)
In September, the UK government proposed changes that it acknowledged would break international law in a "specific and limited way".
The Brexit deal negotiated in 2019 - known as the withdrawal agreement - established new checks on goods travelling from Great Britain and Northern Ireland. This was to prevent checks from having to take place along the Irish border after the transition ends.
However, the UK government said it wanted to make changes to the previously-agreed arrangement in order to bring clarity and avoid disruption from 1 January.
In response, the EU announced it had started legal proceedings against the UK. Despite this, the EU said it would not walk away from the trade talks.
6. UK announces trade deal with Japan (11 September)
A "historic moment" was how International Trade Secretary Liz Truss described the signing of the UK's first major trade deal since it left the EU.
Brexit supporters said the Japan agreement showed that the UK could negotiate better deals than the EU and that further ones would follow.
Critics, however, said it was more important to remain close to the EU and that the Japan deal largely replicated the deal the EU already had.
7. Biden warns UK over Brexit changes (16 September)
US presidential candidate Joe Biden said he would not allow peace in Northern Ireland to become a "casualty of Brexit". In the tweet sent on 16 September, Mr Biden also said there would be no future US-UK trade deal if border checks returned.
8. New lorry permits announced (23 September)
With no breakthrough in the trade talks, the UK government unveiled how it would handle a "reasonable worst case scenario" where queues of 7,000 trucks could clog up roads around the port of Dover and Channel Tunnel from 1 January.
To avoid this, the government said it would introduce a new permit system for lorries entering Kent. This would be to prevent lorries without the right paperwork from travelling into the county and attempting to ferry goods to the EU.
9. Boris Johnson says trade deal is 'up to the EU' (2 October)
With less than 100 days before the new relationship was due to begin, Mr Johnson said that a deal was "all there" and that it was up to the EU to get it across the line.
The EU said while agreement had been reached in a number of technical areas, such as aviation safety, there were still some serious differences to overcome.
If a trade deal doesn't happen then contingency measures, in areas like medicine safety, could be introduced. This would be to try to cushion some of the worst disruption that could begin on 1 January.
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The Indian judiciary is in the midst of an unprecedented crisis which has resulted in rival judges issuing court orders for each other to undergo mental health evaluations. The BBC's Geeta Pandey unravels an extraordinary series of events.
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For the past several months now, Justice Chinnaswamy Swaminathan Karnan of the Calcutta High Court has been on a massive collision course with the top judges of India's Supreme Court.
On Monday, matters came to a head when a seven-judge Supreme Court bench, that included India's Chief Justice JS Khehar, ordered a psychiatric evaluation of Justice Karnan by a panel of government doctors to ascertain if he was mentally ill.
An angry Justice Karnan responded by ordering similar tests on the seven top court judges.
The initial provocation...
The present standoff began on 23 January when Justice Karnan wrote a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi with the names of 20 "corrupt judges" and three senior law officials.
Even though he failed to provide any evidence against those named in the list, he urged Mr Modi to investigate - and take action against them.
On 8 February, the seven-judge bench decided that this - and other similar letters Justice Karnan had sent in the past accusing his fellow judges of corruption and bias - was "contempt of court" and demanded an explanation from him.
On 13 February, the day he was due to appear in court, Justice Karnan did not show up. The top court gave him another chance and asked him to come on 10 March.
But when he ignored that date too, the Supreme Court issued a "bailable warrant" against him, ordering the West Bengal state police chief to bring him in on 31 March.
He was also barred from performing any judicial or administrative functions until further orders.
But the rebel judge did not fall in line.
The crisis escalates
On the same day, he too passed an order - a low-caste Dalit (formerly untouchable), he accused the seven judges of caste bias and ordered that a case be registered against them for discriminating against him.
He also "ordered" them to pay him 140m rupees ($2.2m; £1.7m) in compensation.
A few days later, when the arrest warrant was served to him, he "rejected" it saying it was "illegal" and "unconstitutional".
And it's gone rapidly downhill since then.
Last Friday, Justice Karnan stunned India when he passed an order banning the chief justice and the other six judges from leaving the country.
From a makeshift court he's set up at his home since being barred from the high court, he directed the Air Control Authority in Delhi to prevent the judges from travelling abroad while they were being tried for caste bias against him.
He also ordered the judges to appear at his "home-court" on 1 May - the same day they had asked him to appear in the Supreme Court.
Questions of sanity
On that day, the Supreme Court judges asked whether Justice Karnan was "feigning mental imbalance" and ordered a panel of doctors to examine him on 4 May.
The director general of police (DGP) in West Bengal was ordered to provide a team of officers to help the medical board carry out the examination and the board was ordered to submit its report by 8 May.
The judges believed they were being considerate - they said from what Justice Karnan had been saying at his news conferences and from the "orders" he had passed in recent days, it seemed he might not be able to defend himself in court.
But that did not please the rebel judge.
He said that he was "of sound health and mind", that his wife and two sons are "very much satisfied" with his physical and mental health, that the court order was "an insult to a Dalit judge", and that he would not undergo a medical test.
Within hours, he had also passed his own "counter-order" - directing the director general of police (DGP) in Delhi to send the seven judges before a psychiatric board to check if they were mentally ill and bring the report to him by 7 May.
Now Delhi police is headed by a commissioner and there's no DGP, but that is a minor quibble considering the battle involves India's top judges.
So who is Justice Karnan?
A rebel without a pause.
During his seven-year tenure as a high court judge in Chennai (Madras) from 2009, he accused at least two chief justices of discriminating against him because of his caste.
He also accused a fellow judge of raping an intern - a claim yet to be proven.
On a few occasions, media reports said he also barged into other judges' courtrooms and generally antagonised his colleagues, so much so that at the end of 2014 several of his fellow judges petitioned the chief justice of India, demanding his transfer because they couldn't work with him.
A year ago, when the Supreme Court did transfer him to Kolkata (Calcutta), he passed an order staying his own transfer.
It was only after a closed-door meeting with the then chief justice of India, TS Thakur, that he agreed to move.
So what happens now?
No-one really knows - it's the first time ever in India that the top court has invoked contempt proceedings against a sitting high court judge.
The next important date on the calendar is 4 May - the day Justice Karnan is due to undergo psychiatric evaluation. But it's unlikely that he could be forced to see the doctors against his will.
Legal experts say they expect the case to drag on at least until 12 June - the day he turns 62 and retires.
The Supreme Court may be in a better position to take action against him once he's hung up his robes.
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Councillors are to make a site visit before taking a view on plans to expand a wind farm which was the subject of a six-year opposition campaign.
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Developers want to build another 12 turbines at Fallago Rig near Lauder.
Planning officers had advised Scottish Borders Council to make no objection to the scheme to the Scottish government.
A community council voiced "outrage and disbelief" at that position and councillors will now visit the site themselves before deciding their view.
Developers also want to extend the life of the current 48-turbine wind farm as part of their application.
It would allow the entire 60 turbines to run for 25 years if the second phase became operational.
The local authority was being advised not to oppose the project which will be decided by the Scottish government.
However, councillors decided they should visit the wind farm before agreeing their stance.
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The annual crackdown on crime over the festive period in Aberdeen has been launched.
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Operation Oak targets anti-social behaviour and violence with high-visibility and plain clothes patrols.
In 2011, offences throughout the Christmas and New Year period were said by police to be down by 66.5% after Operation Oak began.
Ch Supt Adrian Watson said: "We will not be complacent and we are determined to build on that progress."
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Ten suspected migrants, including two who are thought to be critically ill, have been rescued by a French lifeboat from the English Channel.
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Eight of the men, who claim to be Iranian, were suffering from "severe hypothermia", according to French officials who picked them up earlier.
The others were believed to have suffered possible poisoning from engine fumes inhaled in the boat's cabin.
The empty boat they were travelling is being towed to Dover by the RNLI.
French authorities have said the boat, which is a small solid hulled vessel, was owned by a British citizen.
More than 120 migrants have crossed the Channel to the UK since 3 November.
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At the end of maternal mental health awareness week, Alexandra Vanotti details her experience of post-natal anxiety and the help she received - which she describes as a godsend.
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By Alexandra VanottiBBC News
My sister was on honeymoon in South Africa when my baby boy was born. It was almost a fortnight before she was due home and I had an overwhelming fear that my baby would die before my sister got a chance to meet him. In my mind, over the coming weeks and months my beautiful baby died a thousand deaths. This, despite his clean bill of health.
You may have twigged already that I wasn't well. It took me a bit longer to realise.
I had an uneventful pregnancy, albeit under the care of the high risk team at Chelsea and Westminster hospital in London. At the age of 21, I had undergone heart surgery, but at this stage my heart was fine and it was years since I had seen a cardiologist.
During the first trimester, I was the textbook example of a glowing mother-to-be, full of excitement and wonder at the life growing inside me. But as I approached the 18-week scan, I started feeling anxious. I read a leaflet on the potential health issues that might be picked up at the anomaly scan and I cried tears of terror. But we passed it with no concern. The baby also passed the foetal heart ultrasound - a necessity with my congenital heart problem. And yet I couldn't shake off the sense of foreboding.
As my due date grew nearer, my focus shifted to childbirth and I was bombarded with unwelcome thoughts of sudden heart failure, a twisted umbilical cord around the baby's neck. Stillbirth.
On the surface, though, I was more serene and calm than my family had ever seen. I told nobody of my fears. "Pack your hospital bag," my mother and sister urged, alarmed that with only one month to go, I'd not made one baby purchase. My husband dragged me to choose buggies and cots, rather than the other way round. I was told many times it was wonderful that I was so laid back. My mind, however, was telling me that my baby would die, so what was the point of buying anything?
Our baby boy was born on 22 January, 2014. Strangely, despite the pain of contractions, I was calm and cheerful throughout labour. When he arrived I was awestruck, spending 12 hours straight just gazing at him in wonder. He was the most beautiful baby I'd ever seen in my life and I happily told anyone who'd listen. I was completely besotted and blissfully happy. Above all, I was relieved that despite my fears, he and I had survived childbirth together.
It was two days later in hospital that I suddenly felt my stomach clench with fear, as I was hit by a crushing sense of responsibility. How could I keep my baby safe in this big scary world? In my mind, the ways in which he could be harmed were infinite. I would have to be on guard the whole time to make sure nothing happened to him.
My nightmare with postnatal anxiety, OCD and insomnia had begun.
My primary obsession was that my baby would die in his sleep - therefore, I had to stay awake while he slept. To be fair, this is a common concern to new parents. Like many new dads, my husband was also on edge and would hover over the sleeping baby to check he was breathing. But for him, the solution was simple - he bought an under-mattress movement sensor, which would sound an alarm if the baby stopped breathing.
My husband slept soundly after this. I, on the other hand, would just be drifting off, only to jolt awake as I felt the need to check, double check, triple check that I'd turned the sensor on. In my mind, the sensor became the only thing standing between my baby and cot death, so I took it everywhere, even slotting it under the mattress in the pram, switching it on whenever I stopped.
Walking down the high street on one of our first excursions out as a family of three, we were overtaken by a little boy on a scooter, his mother close behind. Instantly a series of intrusive disturbing images flitted through my mind - the scooter veering off the pavement into traffic, the boy hit by a car, a little body lying in the street, the mother screaming hysterically. My legs turned to jelly and I had to hold onto the buggy to stop myself falling. The little boy and his mother continued on their way, oblivious.
These intrusive images continued, several times a day. Some seemed like reasonable and appropriate fears, such as dropping the baby as I carried him down the stairs, letting go of the buggy and watching it roll into the road in the path of a car. But others were shocking and strange - accidentally putting the baby in the microwave, opening our front door to a stranger who'd fling acid at me and the baby, dropping him off the side of a ferry and watching him disappear into the waves below. Torturous little horror films that ran through my mind all day.
I felt fearful the whole time, full of adrenalin, the way you feel when you've almost tripped while descending a flight of stairs - racing heart, plummeting stomach, jelly legs. I was so preoccupied with my anxious thoughts that I was disconnected from everything else.
When the baby was not even a week old, my husband, alarmed by my mental state, made an emergency doctor's appointment. Initially the doctor talked about baby blues and how I might find myself feeling better in a week or so, but my husband put his foot down and demanded a referral for therapy. On the NHS it would be a four-to-six-week wait. But thanks to our private medical insurance, a week later I was sitting in the waiting room at the Priory in Roehampton waiting for my first psychiatric assessment.
Signs of postnatal depression
Source: NHS mental health problems and pregnancy
#maternalmentalhealth, #maternalmentalhealthawareness, #askher
The initial assessment involved no therapy, but what seemed like hundreds of questions. The psychiatrist very quickly ascertained that I was suffering from postnatal anxiety and OCD, and that I would benefit from cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT). She explained a sliding scale of anxiety, with most people experiencing it to a certain extent. On her scale I wasn't even near the top, and she reassured me that with therapy I would soon start to feel better. I nodded numbly, wondering just how bad you had to feel to reach the top of the anxiety scale. I felt I was living in my own private hell.
The following week I left the baby with my mother and arrived at the Priory for my first therapy session with a CBT specialist. Cognitive behavioural therapy doesn't involve going back over past issues, instead it looks at current problems and, in particular, it identifies your core beliefs. These are often unrecognised deep-seated beliefs that can affect your life and your behaviour.
In our first session, my therapist quickly identified that I felt utterly crushed by the responsibility of keeping the baby safe. She questioned me gently for almost the whole 90-minute session. Reaching the core belief was like peeling individual layers of an onion, with searching questions that probed deeper and deeper until the fundamental core was revealed.
I broke down in tears and shook with emotion as I finally admitted out loud, "I'm the only person who can keep my baby safe". This was my belief - and I hadn't even known it. Now to work on contesting that belief.
I didn't get better immediately. Not at all. In fact it took nine months of counselling. I found therapy really hard work and didn't look forward to my weekly sessions. I would leave them feeling completely wrung out, emotionally exhausted, and sometimes I couldn't understand why my therapist often went - in my opinion - off on a tangent.
One week she questioned me on my aspirations as a mother and, after listening to me talk about home-cooked food, a clean and tidy house, losing my baby weight, she suggested gently that I stop striving for perfection, and instead aim for "good enough". I looked at her blankly. "What do you mean 'good enough?' Why would I settle for good enough? I want to be the best mum possible," I said. She kept pressing. I kept resisting. I left that session feeling frustrated. In my opinion, good enough meant not enough. And why were we wasting valuable time on this when we should be tackling the "bully in my head" as I had come to call my anxiety? I yearned to be better, back to my old self.
Everywhere I went, I saw danger. It was worse at night. I could almost feel a tangible sense of impending doom. I knew I wouldn't get more than three or four hours' sleep - the baby suffered from silent reflux and woke every 45 minutes after midnight. But even the corners of the room seemed darker and more threatening in the evening.
At night, trying to stop myself falling asleep mid-feed, I found even more horrors on the internet. "The dog ate my baby's head," was one particularly unhelpful headline which had me jumping out of bed at four in the morning, running downstairs to shake my husband awake. "He's going to get mauled by a dog," I cried. He looked at me uncomprehending, bleary eyed, but I couldn't be calmed until he got out of bed and helped me compose an email to my parents and sister about the family cockapoos.
Another news article about baby seats sent shock waves through my core. Babies shouldn't be kept in their car seats for longer than two hours, it said. After reading this, nothing my husband said could convince me to take a car journey longer than half an hour, in case the baby asphyxiated en route.
"I am so anxious," I confided tearfully in my mother. She nodded knowingly and said, "It never goes away, once you're a parent". She didn't realise the extent of my anxiety. I took her words quite literally to mean that I would feel this horrendous for the rest of my life. The bully would never go away. I couldn't possibly survive at that level of anxiety. I thought I had made a mistake, that I was not cut out for motherhood. And then came guilt for not being thankful for my beautiful child.
Ironically I embraced the days when I just felt a dull depression rather than racing anxiety - it was a relief. "This is normal," I told myself. "All mothers feel this and it will pass."
To say I lost myself that first year is no over-exaggeration. I don't recognise my face in photos, my false smile. Delirious and headachy from sleep deprivation, sugar became my crutch and I piled on all the weight I'd lost after giving birth. I didn't get my hair done for more than six months. Putting on a pair of earrings was too much effort. Never mind "good enough", I was failing miserably at being an alpha mum and I knew everyone would be able to see through the camouflage of makeup so it wasn't worth the effort. And I was so very tired, all the time. I hated what was happening to me, and I imagined that my little boy would one day realise he'd drawn the short straw and reject me. I felt he deserved better than me.
The light bulb moment came a few months in, after the "good enough" session. My therapist helped me finally realise that my quest for perfection was fuelling my anxiety. My core belief in this instance? That my self worth was measured by how well I could do things. Before baby, everything from documents at work, to the way my home was decorated, to sourcing a quirky restaurant for dinner with friends, I had put a huge amount of effort into making it as good as possible. I prided myself on being super-organised.
My school friends had a nickname for me - The Guru. I never missed a birthday. I loved doing thoughtful things for my friends and family. My self worth was completely tied up in being this Guru. Naturally I had wanted to be the best mother possible. Before having a baby I had all the time in the world to invest in my pursuit of perfection. But as most new parents discover, you can't control anything about a baby, and it's natural to feel like your life has been turned upside down.
What would happen if I just stopped?
I listened to my therapist and reluctantly decided to give it a go, settling for "good enough" rather than perfection. The world didn't stop turning. The house didn't fall down. I started being kinder and more forgiving of myself. I scrapped my epic "to do" list. I stopped frantically cleaning the kitchen and making the house presentable when the baby napped. Instead, I would curl up next to him and nap too. Or I'd relax with a half-hour treat of daytime TV or trashy magazines ("The trashier the better," my therapist encouraged). I ordered takeaways. I let the dirty washing pile up and ordered myself not to panic about it.
Gradually, life got easier. It felt almost rebellious and sloppy at first, deliberately turning my back on everything I'd strived towards for such a long time. But I soon realised that nobody noticed these changes apart from me. My family and friends didn't love me for the things I did, or how well I did them. They loved me, to quote Bridget Jones, "Just the way you are".
It was deliriously freeing. As I stopped fretting about everything being perfect, I started living in the moment - not dwelling on the past or worrying about the future. Concentrating on one day at a time, I suddenly realised one day that the scary visions and intrusive thoughts were receding.
"You're wearing earrings," exclaimed my therapist one week. I self-consciously touched my ear and smiled. Somehow it hadn't seemed like such an effort this morning.
Like many people, my life has been touched by tragic and traumatic periods, but my first year of motherhood was undoubtedly the toughest time of my life. I think it is safe to say that I was traumatised afterwards. It took a huge toll on my husband, too, watching his wife, his best friend, fall apart before his eyes, turning into someone he didn't recognise.
Three years later, we felt ready to try for our second baby and I was lucky to fall pregnant quickly. I was excited but feared I would fall ill again. The Chelsea and Westminster midwives were really on the ball, though. As soon as I mentioned my previous history during my first check-up, I was referred to the hospital's perinatal service.
I met with psychotherapist Danny once a month or so during my pregnancy. I talked at length about my past experiences and he quickly saw I had convinced myself that the same thing would happen all over again. Danny reassured me that I had a good support network and that we could act swiftly if I fell unwell. I also saw the hospital psychiatrist, who strongly recommended anti-depressants if I started feeling down. My husband, who previously had quite strong opinions on anti-depressants, was in full agreement that this time I should take them if needed.
It started so well. Our baby's birth was calm and without complications. Another beautiful little boy. Bringing him home, I felt our little family was complete, and was elated I'd never have to go through pregnancy again. For the first two weeks I was on a real high - this is what motherhood was meant to feel like. But then he started showing signs of reflux - coughing and spluttering during feeds, hugely disrupted sleep, grimacing in pain. I braced myself for a tough few months but knew that we would survive - after all, we'd done it before with his older brother.
A month after the baby arrived, we lost my elderly father-in-law when he suffered a bad fall. My grieving husband had to organise not just a UK funeral but his father's repatriation to Italy, an enormous task which took up all his time. I developed mastitis. The baby failed his hearing test, showing signs of hearing loss. He wasn't putting on weight (due to his struggles with reflux and breastfeeding). I was diagnosed with a hernia, which needed surgery - and subsequently developed a dangerous infection which required daily visits to hospital. Our troubles seemed never-ending.
I felt massively overwhelmed when left to look after both boys by myself. I literally couldn't put the baby down because of his reflux, which meant that showering, getting dressed, even going to the bathroom was an issue. Getting out of the house with both boys felt like planning a mission to Mars. "Don't you feel utterly panicked when you need to be somewhere at a certain time?" I asked a friend, who was a new mum. "Well," she said, frowning, "It's a mammoth task, of course, but I wouldn't say I panic." I felt self-conscious for over-sharing. I was convinced I couldn't cope. What totally passed me by was that everyone struggles. Looking after babies is hard work, end of story. But for some reason, I felt I needed to have a handle on it - my need for control creeping back in.
Danny came to visit me several times at home and often carried out my therapy sessions while I nursed the baby. There was no way I could have managed the journey to the hospital in those early days.
Both my babies suffered from digestive problems and would scream in discomfort for hours at a time, and both times I cut out cows milk from my diet. But I became obsessive over everything that passed my lips, convinced I was slowly poisoning my baby through my breast milk. At one point, I considered a total elimination diet, eating only pear and lamb, until my mother talked me out of it.
One night, staying at my parents' house while my husband was in Italy, I was delirious with exhaustion after two hours trying to settle my miserable screaming baby. I thought about putting the baby down, walking out the front door and stepping in front of a bus. Five minutes later I was tearfully apologising to my son, nuzzling his neck, promising I'd never leave him. I have never had suicidal thoughts and that moment terrified me into action. In the morning I told my mother how I'd felt. And after half an hour of arguing with her - I insisted I could get better by myself - I agreed to start taking anti-depressants. Within a week, I had stopped crying every day - something I hadn't even realised I'd been doing - and the cloud lifted.
A year later, I am still on anti-depressants, and still see Danny and the team from the Chelsea and Westminster perinatal service. They've been a godsend. I feel content with being "good enough". I feel no shame about my struggles. In fact I feel like shouting my story from the rooftops - if only to help other new mothers who feel like I did.
I know how lucky I am but I am concerned for the women who aren't, who don't have someone fighting their corner with the GP, who don't have private medical insurance, who don't live in a postcode that provides such excellent services. In the four years since my first baby, I've noticed a real change in the way people talk about mental health, but I would like to see a real change in the way mothers-to-be are prepared for what might happen, so it doesn't come as such a shock.
And if a new mother even breathes a whisper about feeling down, she should be taken deadly seriously - because this can be deadly. If you feel like I did, you don't have the "baby blues", you are unwell and need medical attention, just as you would for a broken leg or the flu. New mothers are vulnerable enough (both physically and mentally) without having to fight to be heard.
Becoming a mother is life changing in a way that nobody can prepare for, but what we can prepare for is better support for maternal mental health.
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A platform lift at a construction site in central China has plunged 30 floors to the ground, killing its 19 passengers, state-run media report.
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The accident happened on Thursday in the city of Wuhan in Hubei province, says Xinhua news agency.
The lift, which officials say fell 328ft (100m), mostly carried construction workers.
Officials are investigating the accident, Xinhua says.
"The accident occurred at the construction site, the elevator was being used for construction purposes," a local official was quoted by AFP news agency as saying.
It happened at 01:26 local time (05:26 GMT), the official added.
Thousands of people die every year in work-related accidents in China, where safety rules are often flouted, correspondents say.
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A high court in India has ordered the release of a decorated Indian army veteran who was hauled off to a detention camp after being declared a "foreigner" under a controversial measure. BBC Hindi's Vineet Khare reports on how the man's arrest has outraged India.
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It was the evening of 27 May and Mohd Sanaullah, 52, had just reached his home in Guwahati in the north-eastern Indian state of Assam, when he got a call from the local police superintendent's office.
The man on the other end of the line told Mr Sanaullah that the state's foreigners tribunal had declared him a "foreigner" four days ago and asked him to report there.
"He knew what lay ahead," Mr Sanaullah's lawyer and son-in-law, Shahidul Islam, who was with him in Guwahati at the time of his arrest, told the BBC.
He spent the night in police custody.
On Friday, the high court in Assam granted Mr Sanaullah bail. But his lawyer told the Indian Express newspaper that his appeal challenging his detention in the first place is still pending.
Mr Sanaullah is one of four million people who was left off the latest draft of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) published last year. The NRC was first created in 1951 to determine who was born in India and who might be a migrant from neighbouring, Muslim-majority East Pakistan, now known as Bangladesh.
The census, conducted only in the north-eastern state of Assam, counts as citizens those who can prove that they were residents of India before midnight on 24 March 1971, a day before Bangladesh declared its independence from Pakistan.
An army veteran with 30 years of service, Mr Sanaullah was working as an officer with the border police - a unit of the state police service - when the call came.
Ironically, one of its main jobs is to stem illegal migration from Bangladesh.
Mr Sanaullah was dispatched to a detention centre the next day, where he has been ever since. There are hundreds of people, also declared foreigners, who are in six detention centres around the state.
Even though the most recent version of the NRC was only published in 2018, Assam has a history of trying people suspected to be foreigners. For decades, it did so under a 1983 law, until it was repealed in 2005. The detention centres were set up in 2009 because of fears that those declared "foreigners" would try and escape.
Many have been languishing there for years.
But Mr Sanaullah was luckier than most. His story caught the attention of national media, which began flashing headlines that a "war hero" in the state had been declared a foreigner.
Outrage quickly followed.
A leader from India's main opposition Congress party said Mr Sanaullah's detention was an "insult" to India's armed forces, adding that it demonstrated that the NRC had been compiled in a "high-handed and flawed" manner.
Others asked if the purpose of the NRC was to identify illegal migrants or label all Muslims as illegal immigrants.
Officials are quick to point out that tens of thousands of Hindus were also left off the list. But critics cite the Citizenship Amendment Bill, which seeks to provide citizenship to non-Muslim migrants from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan.
In fact the bill was shelved after people in Assam vehemently protested against it fearing that Hindu migrants who were not included in the NRC would still get citizenship to stay on.
As news of Mr Sanaullah's detention spread, the country's top court also got involved, expressing its "serious concern". It summoned the state's co-ordinator of the NRC and asked him to ensure that the process by which people were deemed foreigners or not was carried out properly.
Mr Sanaullah's case documents revealed that the case against him was built on the basis of "witness statements" questioning his nationality. These statements were made in 2008 and 2009 by three people in his home village.
The documents also contain an alleged "confession" where Mr Sanaullah reportedly said that he is actually from a village near the Bangladeshi capital Dhaka.
But these are all being questioned now.
For one, all three "witnesses" are flatly denying making any statement against Mr Sanaullah to the investigating officer, who has been identified as Chandramal Das.
"Sanaullah was like family to us. Why would I give a statement against him? I never met Chandramal Das or even heard his name until now," Sobahan Ali told the BBC.
Another, Quran Ali, said he was mystified to learn his name was given as that of a witness because he had not even been living in the village at the time that he was supposed to have made this statement.
They say their names have been misused and their signatures forged on the document.
Mr Sanaullah's family also deny he ever made any "confession" about his birthplace to anyone.
These revelations have now prompted police to register a case against Mr Das.
Mr Das, who retired last year, told the NDTV news channel that the entire thing was a "mix-up of reports" - and that he had meant to investigate another man whose name was Sanaulla (both names would be spelled the same in the local language).
"My father only heard of the probe in 2018 when his name didn't figure in the NRC draft list," Mr Sanaullah's daughter Shehnaz Akhar told the BBC.
"It was only when he went to the NRC office that he found out that there was a 10-year-old case against him."
Hafiz Rashid Ahmed Choudhary, a senior lawyer at the Guwahati high court in Assam, says that this case is hardly unique and that there are hundreds of people like Mr Sanaullah who are languishing in detention camps.
"It's happening because of lapses on the part of the agencies. Police officials lack knowledge and sometimes act in a biased manner. And the Foreigners Tribunals are manned by members who give verdicts but have little experience. The minimum experience to be a member is seven years."
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An Iraqi translator who worked extensively with the US military spent almost seven years trying to get his family to America. But with days to go before their departure, President Trump signed a travel ban that put the family's future in question.
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By Jessica LussenhopBBC News Magazine
Friday, 27 January
Baghdad, Iraq
It took seven years for Munther Alaskry to secure visas for his family. Now, they were only four days away from a new life in Houston, Texas, where friends and an apartment were waiting.
But instead of spending his final days in Baghdad celebrating and saying good-bye to family, Munther was in a panic.
President Donald Trump was about to sign an executive order that would ban immigration from seven majority-Muslim countries for 120 days, including Iraq.
Munther - a 37 year old chemical engineer and former translator for the US military - decided they couldn't wait. He told his family they were leaving Baghdad for the US immediately.
His wife Hiba protested - she hadn't finished packing, and her grandfather was about to have emergency surgery for cancer. She wanted to see him before they left. It was only four days, she told him.
"I don't think we have even one day," Munther said.
After hastily selling off the last of their furniture and some jewellery, Munther was able to raise the $5,000 (£4,022.50) needed for the next-day flight to Houston, with a connection through Istanbul, Turkey. The couple crammed the last of their possessions into gigantic roller suitcases, and told their distraught family members there'd been a drastic change of plans.
Saturday, 28 January
Baghdad
As his family slept, Munther flipped anxiously between CNN, Fox News and the BBC. It was just past midnight in Iraq, but in the US, it was still Friday afternoon. Munther watched President Trump at the Pentagon signing an executive order titled "Protecting the Nation From Foreign Terrorist Entry Into the United States".
"I am establishing new vetting measures to keep radical Islamic terrorists out of the United States of America. We don't want them here," Trump said before placing his pen on the paper.
"We want to ensure that we are not admitting into our country the very threats our soldiers are fighting overseas. We only want to admit those into our country who will support our country and love deeply our people."
Munther believed that he firmly belonged in the latter category. He'd always been fascinated by America, learning English from watching action movies like Rambo and The Terminator, and listening to Metallica as a teenager.
He stunned a group of Marines with his knowledge of American heavy metal after he met them at a checkpoint near a relative's home in Baghdad, back in 2003. At the time, he was still a student at the University of Technology, Iraq.
"You speak good English," the Marines told him. "Why don't you join us?"
Munther saw it as an opportunity to rebuild his country in the then-hopeful, post-Saddam Hussein era Iraq.
"I wanted to help the American army and the Iraqi people to understand each other. I was trying to help both of them," he said. "It was the right thing to do."
After the Marines left, Munther got a succession of jobs translating for the 3rd Infantry Division and 1st Armored Division. He was sent to the outskirts of Baghdad to help train the Iraqi National Guard. He manned the checkpoints. He had his own service weapon.
He developed a reputation for his punctuality and his sunny disposition. One former soldier described him to the BBC as a "critical asset", trustworthy with unflinching "integrity and morals".
The most dangerous assignment was with a unit clearing roadside bombs. His convoy was hit more than once.
Fellow translators were getting killed or losing limbs.
They were also getting murdered by members of al-Qaeda.
"They burned them alive. They cut their heads," Alaskry recalled. "In Arabic we say, 'You are putting your spirit on the palm of your hand.' Because you don't know what will happen next."
One day, Alaskry found a letter on his car telling him that he would burn in hell for working for the "infidels".
He fled for Jordan without telling anyone, but returned to Iraq a few years later to once again work for the Americans on a health care project for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
In 2008, Munther married Hiba, also a chemical engineer. When their daughter Dima was born the following year, Munther realized that his young family had no future in Iraq. He was a marked man, and life in Baghdad was too unstable.
The family had to move every year to keep their whereabouts a secret. When American troops began pulling out for good in 2011, Munther felt abandoned, like a trap was closing in on him - a feeling that followed him for years.
"Everyday they are bombing us. Almost everyday, we have like a car bomb," he said. "It's not safe over here, especially [after] working with the Americans."
In 2010, Munther applied for a Special Immigrant Visa, reserved for Iraqis and Afghans who served with the US military and could prove their lives were under threatened as a result.
The programme was choked with applicants desperate to get out of the country. Delays mounted, as did the costs for doctor's exams and certificates from the local police ensuring Munther had no criminal record. Several American law enforcement agencies had to complete independent background checks on the family.
Finally, in December 2016, they were cleared. Their tickets were booked.
"We said, 'There will be a light at the end of the tunnel. We will go to the states. We will secure a better life for our kids."
Saturday, 28 January
Baghdad to Istanbul
In the early morning darkness, Munther and Hiba loaded their enormous bags and two sleepy children into a relative's car and left for the Baghdad airport.
It was the middle of the night in the US. Trump's order, now eight hours old, had not been uploaded to the White House website. As the family checked in, no one questioned their visas or their Iraqi passports.
As they waited for their first flight from Baghdad to Istanbul, Munther dashed off texts to his sponsors and former colleagues from USAID. He sent an email to his contacts at No One Left Behind, a non-profit in Washington founded by American soldiers to help translators resettle in the US.
"I'm so scared ... I don't know what we will face and I don't know if the officer at Istanbul will let us board on the Airplane," he wrote in one message. "Right now the only feeling i have is fear.
"Please pray for us."
The three-hour flight to Istanbul was unbearable. Munther quaked in his seat. It was, he said, "just like a horror movie - when you dream you're jumping from a high building".
In Istanbul, the family transferred to the plane to Houston without incident. After they took their seats, Munther put on cartoons for three year old Hassan. His daughter Dima, an exuberant, chatty seven year old, threw her arms around her father's neck, proclaiming this to be the best airplane she'd ever seen.
Munther started to relax. He reminded Dima of his promise to take her to Disney Land, a treat for which she'd been saving her pocket money.
About 15 minutes after they boarded, a Turkish police officer made her way down the aisle, followed by three uniformed airport security officers. They stopped at Hiba's seat.
"Madame, your passport please," the officer said.
At that moment, Munther says, "I knew our dream was lost".
Sunday, 30 January
Baghdad
After they were pulled from the Turkish flight - the children crying as they were ejected onto the tarmac in the snow - the Alaskrys spent 13 hours in the Turkish airport waiting for a flight back to Baghdad. Hiba and Munther took turns sleeping in order to keep watch over their bags.
By then, news of the executive order had reached airlines and customs officials abroad, and travellers from Syria, Sudan, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Yemen and Somalia were being pulled from their seats or barred at the gates at airports all over the world.
In New York City, flights that had been in the air when Trump signed his order had touched down, and US Customs and Border Patrol officers were beginning to hold anyone from the seven barred countries. Some people were sent back. Some signed documents presented to them that cancelled their visas. Even permanent residents - green card holders - were being told they could not return to their homes in the US.
One of the first Iraqis to be stopped at John F Kennedy International Airport was a man called Hameed Khalid Darweesh, who had come to the US on the same type of visa Munther was carrying: an SIV, which he earned after interpreting for the US military for 10 years.
Over the course of the day more and more reports of detainees at airports around the country began to come in: at San Francisco International, Dulles International in Washington, and Philadelphia International Airport.
As the news spread, demonstrators began showing up to the terminals. Darweesh was eventually released, and a challenge filed in court on his behalf resulted in a US District Court judge ordering a stop to all deportations for visa-holders from the seven countries.
Green card-holders were allowed into the country, in some cases after long, intense interviews by customs officials. Lawyers in Virginia, then Massachusetts, then Washington state and Minnesota filed various motions to block Trump's executive order.
Munther watched the protests swelling at JFK on television from their nearly empty house in Baghdad, their carefully packed bags now strewn in a heap across the floor.
"It was amazing," he said. "Lawyers go voluntarily to help the refugees, to help the immigrants, to help the kids. I was feeling happy because other people could make it.
"American people are great people. Really. I work with them. I know them."
Before they left, Munther sold their car and almost all their furniture. He quit his job and had turned down other offers of employment. Because they missed their flight, the resettlement agency in Houston had to give their apartment away. There would be no refund for the aborted trip, nor for the return flight to Baghdad.
In an upstairs bedroom, Munther flipped through a stack of his old identification badges. His weapons authorisation card, his translator's badge, a pass to former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein's palace, refashioned as a US military base named FOB Prosperity.
He had a stack of photographs of himself standing with American soldiers - playing cards, riding on top of a tank, posing with an M-16 rifle. The younger Munther looks giddy in the photos.
"They were like my brothers, you know?" he said. "They're really nice guys. Really nice."
Munther pulled out another folder stuffed with letters of commendation, certificates of appreciation, and other documentation of his work history.
"Thank you for your hard work and exceptional performance," read one.
"We couldn't do it without you!" said another.
"Another one. Another one," Munther said, flipping faster and faster, then throwing the whole pile on a heap on his bathroom counter. "Even if I have thousands of those, it's now worth nothing, you know?"
Trump's executive order halted all immigration from Iraq for 120 days. The Alaskrys' visas were due to expire in just two months, at which point they'd be back where they started in 2010.
Munther didn't believe they would ever come to the US, at least not while Trump was president.
"Losing a job, losing money, it's OK. You can survive," he said, "But losing your dreams? This is the most terrible thing."
Tuesday, 31 January
Washington
After three days of chaos, confusion, and a blizzard of legal challenges from all over the country, a press conference was called in Washington with the heads of Homeland Security, US Customs and Border Protection and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
"This is not, I repeat, not a ban on Muslims," said Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly.
But Kevin McAleenan, acting commissioner of US Customs and Border Protection, did have an important clarification to make.
"Lawful permanent residents and Special Immigrant Visa holders are allowed to board their flights," he said. The state department later confirmed that "it is in the national interest to allow Iraqi Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) holders to continue to travel to the United States."
Soon after, the founder of No One Left Behind posted a victory message on the group's Facebook page and sent messages to all of their clients abroad, including Munther: "GREAT NEWS! Afghan and Iraq SIVs WILL be allowed to enter America!! We did it!!!"
Wednesday, 1 February
Baghdad
In his empty apartment, Munther watched McAleenan's comments. He checked the US Embassy's website and read the new guidance. Finally, after a representative from the embassy called and confirmed that he and his family would indeed be able to travel, Munther once again booked a flight to the US.
But almost as soon as the tickets were purchased - this time flying through Doha, Qatar, to New York City - dread set in.
"First I was happy, but now I'm scared," he said. "I don't want my wife and kids to face the same situation.
"Oh my god, I cannot handle it. I barely handled it last time."
As they packed their bags once again, it was clear that little Dima was still traumatised by her experience in Turkey. She asked her mother to bring blankets so that when they were kicked off the flight and forced to spend another night in the airport, she would have something to cover herself with.
"I don't want to go to the America because they don't want us to go," she told her father.
Munther tried to reassure her, but he wasn't feeling very sure himself.
"Hopefully everything will be just fine," he repeated over and over. "Fingers crossed."
Thursday, 2 February
Baghdad
After a sleepless night, Munther lined up the suitcases once more at the front door of their home and called Qatar Airlines to make sure they would be able to board their flight.
He was told no. No-one at the airline had heard of the new guidance.
In a panic, Munther called the US Embassy in Baghdad, which referred him to an emergency hotline and emailed him the text of the new rule to show airport officials.
The airline employees were unimpressed. Munther continued sending frantic emails and texts to the US Embassy all the way to the airport. Finally, about an hour before the flight was set to take off, Munther got a call from Qatar Airlines.
"Do you want to hear some good news?" the man asked him.
The family was cleared, and allowed through security with just 30 minutes to make it to their gate. After a sprint through the airport, they arrived just in time for their flight to Doha.
It was at this point that Munther finally broke down.
"I don't know how to describe how I'm feeling right now," he said, tearing up. "Finally. It was a struggle. But finally."
Friday, 3 February
New York City
The flight from Doha touched down at John F Kennedy International Airport at 8:30am, and a small group of lawyers, a local rabbi and a volunteer chauffer waited by customs for the Alaskrys.
An hour passed, then two.
All of the Doha flight passengers came and went with no sign of the family.
"This is worrying," said Emad Khalil, a lawyer from the newly formed group No Ban JFK. He started making phone calls to the American Civil Liberties Union, who in turn began calling the border patrol and airport officials.
After three hours, Khalil was certain that the family was being detained somewhere behind the big, white wall that separated customs from arrivals. If they did not appear soon, the lawyers said they would file a legal motion on behalf of the family.
Finally, after five anxious hours, they finally emerged, Dima and Hassan holding hands, Hiba and Munther smiling from behind a roller cart stacked high with luggage.
Despite the lengthy delay, Hiba said that the customs officials who interviewed them were friendly, and they never felt intimidated.
One woman handed Dima and Hassan drawings from her own children that read, "Welcome to New York!" Dima chattered away about her plans to see Frozen's Elsa at Disney Land.
"I like it so much - it's so cute," she enthused about the bland, sterile airport terminal.
Like her father, she also learned English in part from watching movies.
"She would like to be famous," said Hiba, smiling. "She has a very strong personality."
At the hotel, the family was greeted by two women from No One Left Behind. They brought a basket filled with Legos, Play-Doh, blocks, a fashion drawing kit for Dima. The children unpacked and re-packed the basket over and over again, counting their new bounty.
Finally, the Alaskrys were left alone to ascend to their 15th floor room, overlooking the rooftop gardens of the Upper East Side.
The children ripped open packets of mini Chips Ahoy cookies, and Dima devoured her first Pop-Tart. They scurried from one end of the room to the other. No one seemed ready for a nap, though they'd been up for nearly two days.
The upshot of the cancelled flight to Houston was an unexpected three-day vacation in New York City, thanks to a relative who paid for their hotel as a gift. Sitting on the plush, crisp bedspread, Munther was in disbelief.
"I've been hearing songs about New York, I've been watching New York like from the American movies," he said. "You see like the yellow taxi of New York, the pizza of New York - it's amazing."
The Alaskrys' new, final destination was Rochester, New York, about five hours north of the city, where a host family and a group of about 40 volunteers waited to help them navigate their new lives in the US.
But before all of that, Munther said he was taking his children to the Statue of Liberty.
"Now they are in the best country in the world, in my opinion," he said. "This is my dream, to bring my kids here, now. After like, maybe ten years, 20 years, I'll be able to tell my kids, 'Listen, you were in Baghdad in that situation, I brought you all the way, I did all these sacrifices for you, and you are here now.'
"I'm sure - or I hope - they will appreciate it."
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It may feel like the world isn't the happiest of places at the moment. But first-time author Libby Page is hoping that shining a light on the power of community and friendship in The Lido will be the uplifting read people need.
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By Lauren TurnerEntertainment reporter
Positive reviews of The Lido - about how residents rally together to save their local pool from closure and developers threatening to use the land for luxury flats - started coming in before it was published on Thursday.
While Libby, 25, is delighted, she is also surprised - not least because she almost gave up on the novel after a year of pitching it to agents with no success.
"I think people are hooking onto the fact that it's an uplifting story," she says. "It's nice to read a feel-good story when, particularly in difficult times, there are lots of troubling things in the news. I think people are looking for just something that uplifts them."
'It's hard to be an optimist'
Page says she's an optimist and that she always tries to see the good in the world.
Yet even she admits "it's hard to be an optimist sometimes. But where I see those really positive stories is on the small, local level - in everyday acts of kindness, communities and in normal people.
"So that's what I wanted to write about. There are good things happening and there are good people, and I wanted to tell their stories. It's saying that people's normal lives can be beautiful stories."
The Lido is set in Brixton, where Page lived when she first moved to London from a small town in Dorset.
Yet while many places represented in the book are real, she did use a little artistic licence - including the threat of closure to the (very real) lido, which is not only alive and well but also hosted the book's launch party this week.
Despite this, Page felt the community spirit in Brixton was under threat.
"There were shops closing, chains coming in, big swish apartments being built," she says. "I started to think about what we lose when we lose community spaces. What kind of city will we be left with? That was the start of the idea."
There's much that's uplifting about a story that reflects on the joy of the outdoors and how friendships can be forged in the unlikeliest of places. Yet The Lido also deals with loneliness - something Kate, 26, and Rosemary, 86, have in common besides a love of swimming.
Kate, a junior reporter at a local paper in Brixton, is new to London and struggling to find her feet. She suffers from panic attacks and feels trapped by her insecurity, eating ready meals in her tiny shared flat and never stepping outside her comfort zone.
She meets the widowed Rosemary when she's sent to interview her about the campaign to keep Brockwell Lido open.
(A script is currently being worked on but the film has yet to be cast. When it is, though, Dame Judi Dench would be perfect for the role.)
"Kate has a lot of insecurities and is very lonely at the beginning of the book," says Page. "People relate to that as something we all experience, in different ways and at different times of our lives. But we don't necessarily talk about it.
"For Rosemary, she's dealing with her own loneliness - but she's lived in Brixton for her whole life and has built up these connections. Kate is newer to the area.
"People sometimes underestimate how long it takes to build those connections and feel a part of somewhere. That was definitely something I wanted to write about."
'More in common'
Loneliness in young people is something that's coming to the fore. A study released earlier this month suggested 16 to 24-year-olds were more likely to feel lonely than older people.
"Especially in your early '20s, there's this pressure that you have to be having the best time," agrees Page.
"You see things on Facebook and Instagram and feel that your friends are having this amazing time - but the reality is that there's a lot they're not posting. For a lot of people it's not always easy.
"That stress and anxiety around just finding your place - I hope people can relate to that. It's something a lot of people I know have been through.
"My hope is that if someone reads it who's had that experience, or if they think someone may be going through it, that it encourages them to talk with their friends or family and say 'I've felt that way as well.' That would be amazing, if it leads to those conversations."
As for Rosemary's character, Page adds: "It's refreshing to see an older woman who's at the heart of the community and is very active. Often you see older women portrayed as more passive. But she's very feisty and a real campaigner."
Libby's tips for writing a page-turner
The friendship that's formed between the pair is pivotal to the book. "We have more in common with other humans than we think we do," says Page, a lover of swimming herself.
"Loneliness brings Kate and Rosemary together because they're both lonely in their own way. They make the connection through that, but also through their love of the lido.
"With the outdoor swimming I've done, I've seen people of all ages getting into the water. It's somewhere I've seen and looked up to older women, who are there in their floral swimming costumes jumping into freezing cold water. I just found that so inspiring."
Page adds: "These women do exist and the lido is such a great meeting place for people of all generations and backgrounds. If you're just there in your swimming costume, you're more exposed in a way and maybe you're more likely to start those conversations."
She says early readers of The Lido have told her it's made her think of their own local community, and adds: "What I really love is that people say it's inspired them to go swimming, when they've not been in years. To think you've inspired someone to take an action is just amazing."
The Lido is published by Orion Books.
Follow us on Facebook, on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts, or on Instagram at bbcnewsents. If you have a story suggestion email [email protected].
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Health Minister Mark Drakeford has demanded an independent report into plans to remove doctor-led maternity care at Ysbyty Glan Clwyd in Bodelwyddan.
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He has written to Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board raising concerns over the move.
Under the changes women needing a consultant will have to go to Ysbyty Gwynedd or Wrexham Maelor hospitals.
Mr Drakeford has asked for "assurances" on behalf of expectant mothers.
He wants a "definitive timescale" on when the service will be returned to the hospital.
In the letter, addressed to the health board, Mr Drakeford said: "It's very important that patients and their families are provided with clear in formation on this very important matter, without any room for ambiguity."
The health board welcomed the letter.
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Cambridge Analytica has filed for bankruptcy in the US.
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The consultancy was at the centre of the Facebook data-sharing scandal in which it was accused of improperly obtaining information on users.
The bankruptcy proceedings are part of the process of closing down the company and its UK parent, SCL Elections, that started in early May.
The company blamed a "siege of media coverage" for driving away customers and forcing its closure.
In court papers filed with a New York court, Cambridge Analytica said it had assets of up to $500,000 (£370,000) and debts in the range of $1m to $10m.
Regulators have said that, despite the firm's shutting down and laying off staff, they will still pursue a probe into how the firm used Facebook data.
The social network said data on about 87 million users was grabbed when people completed a quiz hosted on the site. This information was then passed on to Cambridge Analytica which has been accused of using it for political campaigning.
The political consultancy always maintained that it did nothing wrong in the way it obtained and used the data.
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The government must devise a new plan to clean the air after losing two court cases. As part of the So I Can Breathe series, we examine air pollution in the UK. Who is most to blame and what should be done?
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By Roger HarrabinBBC environment analyst
How bad is UK air pollution?
Air pollution is a major contributor to ill health in the UK, but it's hard to say exactly by how much.
Dirty air doesn't directly kill people. But it's estimated in the UK to contribute to the shortening of the lives of around 40,000 people a year, principally by undermining the health of people with heart or lung problems.
How accurate are media headlines about 40,000 deaths?
Headlines claiming that pollution kills 40,000 are just wrong - it's more subtle than that. It's also wrong to say pollution in the UK is rising.
The 40,000 pollution-related deaths figure is not a count of actual deaths - it's a statistical construct, with a lot of uncertainty involved.
Government advisers say the 40,000 number might be a sixth as big - or twice as big.
Pollution clearly is a problem, though. And, remember, it doesn't just contribute to early deaths, it also compromises the health of people suffering from ailments like asthma and hay fever.
Is pollution increasing?
In cities globally, pollution is increasing.
In the UK, air pollution nationally has been generally dropping (except from ammonia from farming).
But despite the overall fall, in many big UK cities safe limits on harmful particulates and oxides of nitrogen - NOx - are still regularly breached. And in London, NOx levels at the roadside have barely dropped at all.
Why is there so much concern at the moment?
Experts in air pollution argue that it has been under-reported for decades, but the issue has been thrust into the news because the UK government lost court cases over illegally dirty air, and because car makers were found to be cheating tests on car emissions.
Scientists are also more confident now about the ways that air pollution harms people. It has even recently been linked with dementia, although that link remains debatable.
Diesel cars seem to be portrayed as the main villains. Is that fair?
Yes and no. Diesel car manufacturers drew fire by cheating emissions tests. Diesels are much more polluting than petrol cars on a local scale, and the biggest proportion of pollution in UK cities does come from road transport in general.
But if you look at Greater London (London stats are the most detailed) you see that private diesel cars contribute 11% of NOx - less than you might have thought. Lorries - with far fewer numbers on the roads - produce the same amount.
Zoom into Central London, and just 5% of NOx comes from private diesel cars. That is dwarfed by 38% from gas for heating homes and offices.
There are many other sources of pollution, including buses, taxis, industry and other machinery, such as on building sites. So it's a many-sided problem.
What should we do?
Solving air pollution needs a many-sided approach. The best value for money comes from targeting the really big individual polluters - that's old buses and lorries in cities. Most big cities are already doing that, although critics say not fast enough.
Insulating homes so they don't burn as much gas, would save pollution, cash and carbon emissions in the long term - but critics say the government appears to have no strategy for this.
Stopping the spread of wood-burning stoves in cities might help a bit. Cutting pollution from ships would be good in port cities. Reducing use of some chemicals in the home would help a little.
What about taxing diesel cars more?
A previous government encouraged drivers to buy diesel vehicles because they produced fewer emissions of greenhouse gases. Incentives for diesel were removed in 1999.
Petrol cars are now almost as efficient and are much less polluting locally, so scientists say it makes sense to tax diesel cars extra.
Politicians are nervous upsetting drivers, and we shall have to wait to the Budget to see how they respond.
Ministers are also under pressure to offer a £3,500 incentive for drivers to scrap old diesel cars, which would incentivise the purchase of new cleaner vehicles.
The Green party says it would be perverse to reward car makers with increased sales when they caused the problem in the first place by failing on their promises to government to make diesel engines clean.
Follow Roger on Twitter.
So I Can Breathe
A week of coverage by BBC News examining possible solutions to the problems caused by air pollution.
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A 64-year-old man has died after his motorbike crashed near Moffat in Dumfries and Galloway.
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The crash happened on the A701 Dumfries to Edinburgh road at about 17:50 on Friday.
Emergency services attended but the man was pronounced dead at the scene.
Police have appealed for anyone with information about the crash, which involved a red and black motorbike, to contact them. They are keen to hear from anyone with dashcam footage.
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A laser pointer pen was aimed towards a passenger aircraft as it was landing at Inverness Airport.
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Police said the incident could have distracted the flight crew and had "catastrophic consequences".
The green laser pen was directed towards the plane as it was landing at about 17:30 on Wednesday.
Police Scotland have appealed for information.
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Moves to tighten up the laws governing the running of pharmacies in Guernsey have been approved by the States.
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Pharmacists, who need to have UK qualifications, will only be allowed sole charge of pharmacy once they have three years experience.
The Health Department called for the change to ensure patient safety.
A change to the proposition allowing pharmacists without three years experience to run pharmacies on a short-term basis was also approved.
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After years of campaigning Cornwall is moving closer to gaining the cultural and political recognition some feel it deserves. The Cornish people will be granted minority status under European rules for the protection of national minorities. But what will this actually mean?
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By Emma HallettBBC News
Walk down a street in one of the many coastal villages in Cornwall and you will most likely see a long line of Cornish pasty shops, cafes serving Cornish cream teas and - when you reach the harbour - the distinct smell and look of a proud fishing history.
Its cobbled streets have a rich past and even in Cornwall's larger towns, many of which were built up around its former mining industry, there is something intangible that sets this part of the country aside. You know you are in Cornwall.
And yet, the sense of being in a nation apart - such as one experiences in Scotland or Wales - does not quite apply in Cornwall.
While it has its own language, and many of the place names are in Cornish, there are few other outward signs of it to be seen as you move around the peninsula.
The minority status, which already applies to the Scots, Welsh and Irish, means government and public bodies will be required to consider them when making decisions.
But what impact will that have on Cornish people's lives?
A discussion on BBC Radio Cornwall's Facebook page revealed a mixed response, with Shaun Jenkin writing: "Do we really care? What difference will it make to us? None.
"Will it help me find a job in Cornwall now I've been made redundant, no.
"So what's the point? Probably to line the pockets of those who we will never know sat in posh offices around the county. And before you ask yes I am Cornish."
Ben Lean added: "I already knew I was Cornish. I don't need some European mumbo-jumbo to tell me that."
Despite this, many of the comments were supportive of the move, with many adding they are "proud to be Cornish".
But if anything is to be learnt from Cornwall's Celtic cousins, having minority status may not be worth getting excited about.
Emyr Lewis, a senior fellow in Welsh Law at Cardiff University, said the impact of minority status on Wales had been "insignificant".
He said: "It is good that it is there and that the Welsh language and culture is recognised by the UK, but the actual impact has been relatively small.
"For the Cornish however, and the Cornish people, it could be more. The reason is that the Cornish minority have not traditionally been regarded in the same way the Welsh have or the Scots have, or the Irish.
"So I think this is a positive step. It could be even more valuable in the case of the Cornish because it affirms the respectability in international law terms for people who consider themselves to be Cornish and removes them from being marginal."
Cornish campaigner and comedian Edward Rowe, also known as the Kernow King, said the status was "obviously great news for the people of Cornwall".
He added: "It is great for Cornwall to get the recognition for its culture and heritage that it deserves."
Perhaps the most crucial point that has led towards Cornwall being given minority status is the fact it has its own language.
However, only about 1,000 of its 532,000 inhabitants are estimated to actually speak it, according to Julian German, a Cornwall Council cabinet member and chairman of the Cornish Language Partnership.
Now minority status has been given, Mr German said the council - which is "very keen to promote the language" - would be discussing with the department of transport whether or not to allow bilingual signs on the roads.
Elizabeth Stewart, who presents the Cornish language programme An Nowodhow on BBC Radio Cornwall, said its influence should not be under estimated.
"You can look at all sorts of different areas, regions, within the British Isles, and you will have areas that will have a particular type of Morris dancing or a particular type of music that is local to that area," she said.
"But does that mean they it has got its own identity as a nation? No. It has got its own local identity and that should be celebrated and cherished, but what makes Cornwall distinct and what links us with the Celtic nations of Wales Ireland, Scotland, it is the language."
Of course it is argued the distinct Cornish culture goes much further than just its language, including music, dance, games and folklore.
Every year, St Piran's Day - the national day of the people of Cornwall - is celebrated with parades, national dress and music.
And one of Cornwall's best known traditions - Padstow's Obby Oss - takes place every May Day. The centuries-old tradition sees the Obby Oss dance through the streets of the Cornish town, to welcome the coming of summer.
Mr German admitted the status did not attract any extra money but he said minority status would allow the Cornish people to feel confident as well as strengthening the Cornish "brand".
He said: "It's about self-confidence and people just being able to say they are Cornish.
"It is a discussion that many people have in Cornwall, whether it is in the workplace, in the pub, wherever, with someone saying 'I'm Cornish' and someone else saying 'no, you're not'.
"Now with this recognition, that is the government's position, we have been recognised and can be identified as Cornish, and as with the Welsh, the Scots and the Irish, that recognition will really help boost confidence."
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Concern has been growing in Australia in recent months over the effect on domestic security of Australian nationals fighting with or sympathising with Islamist militant groups in Iraq and Syria. The BBC looks at how events - and related legislation - have developed.
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20 April 2015: British police say a 14-year-old boy from northern England was arrested on 2 April in connection with an alleged plot to target an Anzac memorial event in Australia. The same alleged plot had seen five teenagers arrested in Melbourne on 18 April, including Sevdet Besim, 18, who was charged with conspiring to commit a terrorist act.
2 March: Australia makes it illegal for its citizens to travel to IS-held Mosul in Iraq without "legitimate" reason.
23 Feb: PM Tony Abbott announces plans to toughen citizenship laws and clamp down on those inciting hatred.
11 Feb: Police arrest and charge two men with planning to carry out an imminent attack, saying they seized a hunting knife, an IS flag and a video describing an attack.
24 Dec 2014: Counter-terrorism police in Sydney arrest two men, charging one with possession of documents designed to facilitate a terrorist attack.
15-16 Dec: Gunman Man Haron Monis, a self-styled cleric originally from Iran, takes 17 people hostage in a cafe in the centre of Sydney. Monis and two hostages are killed after a 16-hour siege. His former lawyer describes him as "unhinged" but not a jihadist.
4 Dec: Australia bans its citizens from travelling to the Syrian province of Raqqa, stronghold of IS.
30 Oct: Parliament completes approval of a security law that creates a new offence of "advocating terrorism" and seeks to ban Australians from travelling to certain conflict areas.
29 Oct: The government says it is trying to confirm reports that the most senior Australian member of IS, Mohammad Ali Baryalei, has been killed in Syria.
8 Oct: Mr Abbott proposes ban on foreign "hate preachers".
3 Oct: Australia approves air strikes against IS.
23 Sep: A teenager described as a "known terror suspect" is shot dead after he stabs two police officers at a Melbourne police station.
18 Sep: Australia carries out what it calls its biggest counter-terrorism raid; Mr Abbott later confirms this was linked to an alleged plot by Australia-based individuals to kill a randomly selected member of the public. The intelligence is reported to have come from an intercepted telephone call involving an Australian fighter with Islamic State (IS) in Syria.
14 Sep: Prime Minister Tony Abbott commits 600 troops to fight against Islamic State, as part of a multilateral effort.
12 Sep: Australia raises terror threat level from medium to high, for the first time since the system was introduced in 2003.
10 Sep: Brisbane Islamic centre raided; two charged with terrorism offences.
27 Aug: New counter-terrorism units set up in airports to stop departing fighters. Separately, director general of Australia's spy agency, David Irvine, says 15 Australian militants have died fighting in Iraq and Syria. One hundred or more people in Australia are "actively supporting" militant groups by recruiting new fighters and providing funds, he says.
11 Aug: Image emerges of young son of Australian militant fighter holding severed head of Syrian soldier.
5 Aug: New legislation aimed at preventing people going to fight with Islamist groups announced.
21 July 2014: Officials say Australian suicide bomber behind an attack in Iraq; concern grows over the number of Australians fighting for Islamist militant groups in the Middle East and the effect of them and their supporters and sympathisers on domestic security.
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A regatta featuring dozens of vessels and attracting thousands of visitors has started in Cornwall.
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Forty-three vessels from around the world are taking part in the Falmouth Tall Ships Regatta.
It is the fifth time the town has hosted the tall ships since they first visited in 1966. In 2008 the event attracted more than 100,000 visitors.
The regatta will run until 31 August with the tall ships leaving Falmouth Bay on Sunday and sailing to London.
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The first hearings for Democratic Senator Bernie Sanders' plan to revamp US health care began this week on Capitol Hill. It's a vision that has garnered support from some of Mr Sanders' 2020 presidential rivals and attacks from President Trump and his Republican party. So what is it?
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It's widely known that the US has the most expensive healthcare system in the world, and health outcomes vary according to your means.
President Barack Obama tried to overhaul it. But even after his landmark Affordable Care Act, some 27 million Americans remain uninsured.
His successor in the White House has tried to dismantle that legislation, making healthcare a central issue in next year's presidential election.
Mr Sanders' so-called Medicare for All plan will play a big part in the debate.
So what's in it?
Firstly, what's Medicare?
Medicare is a federally run programme that offers health insurance coverage for Americans aged 65 and older, as well as individuals with certain disabilities or medical conditions. It covers both hospital and medical costs.
The programme is broken up into different plans (called Medicare A, B, C and D) that individuals can select depending on their needs. There are additional private plans available to supplement the basic coverage.
Most still require patients to pay annual premiums as well as deductibles (what patients pay for treatment before insurers step in) and co-payments (fixed cost of a service or prescription) that are set based on rates negotiated by the government with providers. These rates can change year to year.
Many people find they need supplemental insurance coverage even with Medicare, as the programme will only pay for 80% of approved medical costs or for 60 days of hospital care.
As it stands, Medicare is not a single-payer system since private insurers can participate.
What is Sanders proposing?
Medicare for All is a proposal to expand Medicare into a single-payer health system.
That means the federal government would be the sole, nationwide insurance provider for all essential and preventative healthcare.
It is not a universal health care system where the government would own and operate hospitals - instead, the government would pay private providers an agreed upon rate for their services.
Under Senator Bernie Sanders' proposal, first introduced in 2017 and re-introduced in April, Medicare for All would expand Medicare's coverage to include vision, dental, prescription drugs, nursing home care and reproductive health services.
The 2019 update to the plan also includes a long-term care coverage for patients with disabilities - amending one of the criticisms of his earlier plan.
The change also brings Mr Sanders' plan more in line with the version of Medicare for All proposed in the House of Representatives by congresswoman Pramila Jayapal of Washington state.
In four years, Mr Sanders' plan would have the country phase out of private insurance plans so everyone would receive insurance from the federal government.
The Affordable Care Act would also end, as users would be enveloped into the national plan.
Private insurance companies and employers would be banned from selling any manner of duplicate plans for services covered under the government's programme, though plans for non-essential medical services like cosmetic surgery could remain.
Mr Sanders' proposal would see an end to the "cost sharing" that makes up the current system: No deductibles, no premiums, no co-payments for care.
The only out-of-pocket expense under Mr Sanders' plan would be for some non-generic prescription drugs, but any cost to the patient would be capped at $200 annually.
For comparison, US patients in 2016 paid over $535bn for prescription drugs, according to government estimates.
Mr Sanders' Medicare for All would see a new 6.2% tax paid by employers on all wages; estate tax reforms; more taxes on the wealthy; and a 2.2% income tax on personal income with no credits allowed.
Ms Jayapal's plan mostly tracks with Mr Sanders', but also includes provisions to roll out the programme in two years instead of four, offer no out-of-pocket costs at all for prescriptions, and grant the government the ability to issue generic prescription licences to bring down costs if negotiating with companies fails.
Will it succeed?
In 2016, Bernie Sanders put universal healthcare on the map as a Democratic policy objective, even as Hillary Clinton scoffed that it was an unpractical and unachievable goal.
Now Mr Sanders is no longer a lone voice in the party.
Within the burgeoning field of Democratic presidential hopefuls, however, there are variations on the scope and speed of reform. Some would prefer to add a government-run option within the existing system. Others want to put private insurers out of business.
On Wednesday, Mr Sanders made clear once again he's in the latter camp. The plan the Vermont senator proposes would be more generous than government-run systems in other countries. That may appeal to voters - at least until the price tag is discussed.
Then expect some Democrats to again say enacting such a programme is unrealistic in the extreme. When it comes to healthcare, many Americans are fearful of disruptive change. The current system may be flawed, but its flaws are known.
Mr Sanders, who preaches "political revolution", doesn't do small and incremental, however. He's again cutting a path to the party's left. Can he again convince others to follow?
What are the arguments for Medicare for All?
Everyone is covered
With millions still uninsured - and forgoing care because they cannot afford treatments - Medicare for All would ensure healthcare is a right for all Americans.
Affordability
The government's bargaining power would drive down healthcare costs, supporters say, pointing out that government health programmes like veterans' health already receive 50% in discounts on prescriptions.
And unlike the current system, where deductibles can be as high as $10,000 for patients before their insurance plans even kick in, Medicare for All would guarantee everyone could afford any care visits and prescriptions.
System consolidation
Medicare for All would remove health insurance responsibilities from employers and states as private insurance and Medicaid would be rolled into the federal plan.
Providers would not need to navigate a labyrinthine system to file reimbursement claims and it would be easier for patients to understand and use the system.
Reducing healthcare spending
Bringing down rates for services and prescriptions would help lower the overall cost of the health system.
Administrative health costs could also be reduced by $400bn under Medicare for All, according to The Physicians for a National Health Program group.
A nonpartisan report by the Congressional Budget Office on 1 May also found that a government-run plan would probably lower administrative costs.
Other analyses have also found that a single-payer plan would ultimately reduce total national healthcare spending. University of Massachusetts Amherst economist Prof Gerald Friedman estimated savings could be between $5.5tn and $12.5tn in the next decade.
One report by the Citizens for Tax Justice advocacy group found that for all but the highest-earning Americans, Mr Sanders' plan would result in an increase in post-tax income.
A study by the conservative-leaning Mercatus Center also found that Mr Sanders' plan could see a $482bn decrease in health spending and $1.5tn in administrative cost reductions, amounting to a $2tn decrease in health spending in a decade compared to current projections - but noted that "the actual cost of [Medicare for All] would be substantially greater than these estimates" as they assume "significant" and "dramatic" savings.
And what are the arguments against?
Taxes
A fear of higher taxes is perhaps the biggest reason for pushback against a national health programme.
Under Medicare for All, nearly all residents would see new annual taxes.
Income tax reform would make wealthier Americans pay more: An income between $250,000 to $500,000 would see a 40% tax; an income of over $10m would see a 52% tax.
But some experts worry Mr Sanders' current tax plan would not adequately finance a Medicare for All programme, and that actual taxes could end up being even higher.
Cost
Mr Sanders in 2016 estimated his plan would cost $1.38tn per year, while opponents say costs could be double that.
Medicare for All would increase government spending in a decade by anywhere from $25tn to $35tn according to US economists and think tanks.
Both Mercatus and the Urban Institute - institutions that lean conservative and liberal respectively - put 10-year costs at least around $32tn.
Mercatus' Charles Blahous has since clarified his report on the programme's cost, saying he believes it would actually cost between $54tn and $60tn over a decade.
The Congressional Budget Office did not offer specific numbers, but said any single-payer system would "significantly increase government spending and require substantial additional government resources".
Pay cuts all around
Private insurance companies would essentially be eliminated. In addition, with the government setting prices, both providers and pharmaceutical companies would also face profit losses.
The Mercatus study noted that for the Medicare for All plan's savings to work, providers must acquiesce to a 40% reduction in reimbursements compared to current private insurance payments.
Decrease in care quality
Tied to profit reductions, opponents say the quality of healthcare could be negatively affected if providers face deficits and disruptions, warning that hospitals could quickly go out of business.
The issue of wait times is also one many Americans are wary of given horror stories of year-long waits for surgeries from the NHS and Canada - opponents say the increased number of patients in the system may overwhelm providers already dealing with budget cuts.
The Budget Office report also noted a single-payer plan would "put pressure on the available supply of care" and "patients might face increased wait times and reduced access to care" in the short term.
No innovation
Some of those against federal intervention in the health system have cautioned that cutting payments to the health industry would stifle US innovation.
The abortion debate
Under Medicare for All, abortions would be covered by the federal insurance plan - an aspect that will certainly draw criticism from conservative groups who are already outspoken against any federal funding for the controversial procedure.
What's the public opinion?
Support for a national healthcare system has somewhat increased overall, national polls say, but the divide along political lines has deepened.
A Harvard-Politico poll in January found 68% of Americans said working on a plan like Medicare for All should be a top priority for Congress.
The nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) similarly reported six in 10 Americans are in favour of a national health system. But support for Medicare for All fluctuates based on how it's described, the March poll found.
Americans are in favour of a system that covers everyone and ends premiums and out-of-pocket payments, but the idea of higher taxes or wait times for care sees support sharply decrease.
Along party lines, 61% of Republicans polled said they strongly opposed Medicare for All, while 54% of Democrats said they strongly favoured it.
An optional Medicare for All plan that would allow people to retain their current insurance garnered more bipartisan support in the KFF poll, with 74% support overall and 47% support from Republicans.
How does the US compare to other systems?
Firstly, it's a lot more expensive in terms of cash spent.
Most government-funded health plans around the world do require individuals to pitch in, making these Medicare for All proposals more generous than anything currently in place.
An important distinction to make when comparing Medicare for All to systems like the NHS is that this is still not socialised care. In the US, the Veterans Health Administration, for example, operates on a socialised medical system like the NHS, with federally run hospitals.
Medicare for All would move the entire US system into a single-payer, social insurance model - very similar to Canada.
Canada's government funds universal healthcare coverage by reimbursing private providers. Provinces and territories are able to operate their own programmes with varying levels of coverage, so it is not entirely controlled by the federal government.
Under the Canadian system, patients still largely need to pay for their own dental and vision care as well as some prescriptions.
In the UK, in addition to covering the costs of care, the government owns hospitals and employs physicians. Prescriptions in hospital are free and those for outpatients are subsidised, so that patients generally only pay a minimum co-payment - usually around $12 (£9). For some groups, prescriptions are completely free, like those under 16, the elderly or full-time students up to age 18.
Reporting by Ritu Prasad
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Just as Europe was hoping it could put Covid to rest, the virus has risen again, with renewed venom. Case numbers have been rising and in their wake, hospital admissions too.
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Each country is trying to find the right combination of measures - local lockdowns, test-and-trace initiatives, economic support and public communication - to drive down numbers as winter approaches. As the UK government prepares to unveil a range of new lockdown rules, BBC reporters from France, Germany and other European capitals explain how their countries are managing.
At the bottom of the article, we show how two key nations in Asia have seen a different trajectory.
Deaths 32,521 | Death rate 50 per 100,000 people | Total cases 671,638
Warning lights are flashing in French cities as the long-anticipated autumn surge starts to make itself felt, writes Hugh Schofield, in Paris.
All key indicators give cause for concern. Roughly 18,000 new cases are being detected each day. The number of cases is 116 per 100,000 people and also rising. According to doctors, the main vector is young people resuming social lives post-lockdown and then passing the virus on.
However, there is a change from the first wave in March/April because this time, thanks to testing, the big regional and city/countryside variations are clear to see. Increasingly the epidemic is seen as an urban phenomenon. This means that the government's response is not - and is unlikely ever to be - another national lockdown.
Instead the health authorities have devised a complex system of regional alert levels. About two-thirds of the country are now in a red zone, meaning the virus there is spreading.
With each level new restrictions kick in. For example in Paris, on maximum alert along with five other cities, bars are now shut.
At the lowest alert level, gatherings are limited to 30; at the higher levels the limit is 10. In addition, government representatives in the regions have discretionary powers to order other measures - such as the compulsory wearing of masks in Paris.
Like in other countries, France's mantra is test, trace, isolate. The number of daily tests is now about 175,000. There is already a nationwide network of independent laboratories which have become testing sites, though others have been set up by town halls. When I got tested after developing symptoms in September, it took just a day to arrange the test and another day for the result (negative). However, by general admission, the contact tracing system it is not functioning as it should be. Simply put, there are too many cases and the government is recruiting an extra 2,000 extra staff.
In keeping with its reputation, France claims to have the most generous state help in Europe to individuals and businesses that are suffering from Covid. People who are isolating can claim sick benefit in the normal way. If a child needs home care because of an outbreak at school, a parent can stay at home and go on furlough. Furlough has been offered to 1.3 million workers so far. The scheme, under which companies can be reimbursed 85% of a person's salary, has now been extended into the new year.
If it is all very French, it is what people expect - not that they show huge confidence in the way the epidemic is being handled.
A poll by Elabe this week suggested only 35% of people trusted the government to "fight effectively against Covid". Some 73% said they were "personally worried" about the virus - an increase of four points in a week.
Deaths 906 | Death rate 8.5 per 100,000 people | Total cases 109,374
If seven days is a long time in politics, how long is seven months in a pandemic? To most here, it feels like an age, writes Rob Cameron, in Prague.
Back in March, the Czech Republic was feted for its rapid response to Covid, shutting its borders and swiftly locking down most of the economy. People were told to stay at home where possible. Masks were made compulsory indoors and out. Most respected the measures with good grace and humour.
By the end of June, an infamous dinner party was held on Prague's Charles Bridge to celebrate the end of "this difficult period of the coronavirus crisis" (although not to declare the virus itself vanquished, as is sometimes wrongly claimed). At that time, the country of 10.7 million was seeing 150 cases a day and had recorded 347 deaths in just over three months.
The sun shone. Holidays were booked. Masks and other restrictions were gleefully abandoned.
Today, the Czech Republic has both the highest and the fastest-growing daily number of new cases in Europe, with figures almost double those in the UK. The ratio of positive cases to tests stands at 30% - a number that terrifies epidemiologists.
The total death toll now stands at more than 800, but will almost certainly pass 1,000 by next week.
Officials warn the country's hospitals could soon become overwhelmed.
The track-and-trace system has struggled to keep up. Authorities are taking days - sometimes 14 - to contact people who might have come into contact with an infected person. Its helplines are permanently engaged.
"A difficult period lies ahead of us. We will need all hands on deck," Health Minister Roman Prymula, himself an epidemiologist, told a televised news briefing. Standing next to him on the podium was Prime Minister Andrej Babis, the man whom many Czechs blame for the current crisis. It was Mr Babis - it is widely believed - who vetoed a plan to re-introduce regulations on masks. In the end, the numbers began their inexorable climb to their current peak, and new measures are being introduced anyway.
They were too little, too late.
The PM has warned that a new lockdown cannot be ruled out and urged people to stay at home for the weekend.
Czechs, meanwhile, are trying to grapple with the myriad new rules and regulations coming into force on Monday. Pubs, restaurants and bars will only be able to seat a maximum of four people at one table, and must close at 20:00. Wi-fi will be switched off in shopping centres to put off young people from gathering. Only groups of two will be able to enter shops or shopping centres together, and children aged 12-15 will take turns doing online teaching on a class-by-class basis, to keep classes from mixing in schools.
Some scientists say the Czech numbers in March were so low it was wrong even to call it an epidemic. That, sadly, is no longer the case.
Deaths 9,609 | Death rate 11.6 per 100,000 people | Total cases 320,899
Germany is widely held up as a model of how to manage Covid in Europe, but there is a nervousness in the air as the weather gets colder, writes Damian McGuinness in Berlin.
So far it has fared comparatively well. Total deaths are below 10,000 - less than a quarter the UK total, in a population significantly larger. But infections, which had remained low over the summer, have started to surge. The latest daily rate is almost 5,000 - a high not seen since April.
This is still low compared with other big European countries. And so far, Germany's track-and-trace system has held up well, but it has its limits. As infections rise, the system will start to struggle. This has already happened in Berlin, Frankfurt and Bremen. Other urban centres are also seeing a sudden rise in infection rates.
And while it's mostly young people now, the fear is that the virus will find its way into the older, more vulnerable population.
Which is why on Friday afternoon Chancellor Angela Merkel had a video conference with the mayors of Germany's 11 biggest cities to decide new stricter measures.
"Now is the time that we will determine in what shape Germany will get through the pandemic this winter," Mrs Merkel said.
This weekend some cities, including Berlin, are introducing a 23:00 closing times for bars, cafes and restaurants. Limits on numbers of people allowed to meet are also being brought back. Mrs Merkel will meet mayors again in two weeks, and if infection rates haven't fallen, tougher measures will be introduced.
The lockdown in Germany was milder than in other European countries — there were never restrictions on going outside, for example. It was also shorter, meaning that businesses suffered less of a hit. Mask-wearing has become ubiquitous, so there have been few outbreaks on transport, in shops, or at other services such as hairdressers.
Polling shows that most people support the government's measures. It's rare to see anyone flouting the rules about wearing face-coverings in shops or on public transport. Mrs Merkel's personal ratings are the highest of any politician. Unemployment rates have only increased by one percentage point since March. In September, the jobless figure even went down slightly.
But Germany would struggle to afford another lockdown — particularly with such generous state support. And unlike the UK, where furlough payments have tapered off in recent months, in Germany they increase the longer someone can't work, or is forced to take a salary cut, because of Covid. The 67% of salary paid to workers with kids for the first three months rises to 87% after six months, and the scheme is set to run until the end of 2021.
Deaths 6,546 | Death rate 38.4 per 100,000 people | Total cases 161,929
"Very bad" was Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte's assessment on Friday of how his country is faring. An understatement perhaps, given the Netherlands has one of the worst infection rates in Europe - almost 6,000 new cases recorded on Thursday, writes Anna Holligan, in The Hague.
Like the UK, the second wave came sooner than many expected. Rules had been relaxed over the summer. There was an impression the Netherlands had beaten the virus.
Tests are in short supply, as are the staff to do them. The country can handle 17,500 a day but that means not everyone with symptoms can be tested. There is a joke that the government is adopting Dutch GP's usual advice: "Take a paracetamol."
This weekend a long-awaited contact tracing app was due to go live. Most bars and restaurants already have registers for customers to leave their details, but few do. Where health authorities do have people's details, they have often been unable to cope and so contacts have gone untraced.
In March, the Netherlands implemented a self-titled "intelligent lockdown", so life could continue while limiting the spread of the virus. More recently, people have been advised to wear masks in all enclosed public spaces. But introducing mask rules in two stages appears to have affected compliance. Mask-wearers remain in the minority. Looking in shops as I cycled down my local high street in The Hague, no-one was wearing a mask.
There has been a huge economic support package, covering up to 90% of wages. Business owners can apply for a "gift" of 1,000 euros (£906) a month. But the government focus now is on encouraging people to adapt to "the new economic reality".
Chaotic and shambolic are words not often used to describe the Dutch, but increasingly they are how critics have characterised Mr Rutte's handling of the outbreak. Public approval has crumbled. According to the latest polls, support for the government's approach has dipped from 75% to 65%. Some 66% said ministers should be introducing tougher measures.
If there's no downturn in new cases over this weekend, the prime minister has warned tougher measures are unavoidable.
Deaths 32,929 | Death rate 70.5 per 100,000 people | Total cases 861,112
Spain started to see infections rise again almost as soon as its strict national lockdown was lifted at the end of June. There have been constant new outbreaks since then, and the government now accepts that a second wave is hitting the country, writes Guy Hedgecoe in Madrid.
There are currently more than 10,000 patients in hospital with the virus. Spain has had the highest number of cases in Europe so far and last week registered another 57,247.
Testing capacity has increased since the peak of the first wave, to about 50,000 tests a day. But the numbers of tests available can vary a great deal from one region to another and there are concerns that this has contributed to Spain's difficulties in managing the pandemic.
There are no figures showing the total number of tracers at work in Spain. The health ministry has a tracing app, Radar Covid, but fewer than 10% of Spaniards have it on their phones.
The government recently extended a furlough scheme for businesses until the end of January. It allows companies to send workers home or reduce their hours, maintaining unemployment benefits at 70% for those not working.
Although infections have been rising in almost all areas of the country since the summer, some regions have been particularly hard hit. In July and August, the north-eastern regions of Catalonia, the Basque Country and Aragón saw a sharp spike in cases and, more recently, the Madrid region has become the biggest source of new infections.
The authorities have been introducing local restrictions to tackle outbreaks. In some cases, rules are introduced across a whole region, such as the closure of nightclubs in Catalonia. In other cases, movements are restricted in a town or village and locals are urged to stay at home.
Face masks are obligatory in all public places for anyone over the age of six, with some exceptions, and it is unusual to see people flouting that rule on the streets of a city, for example.
But while Spaniards have generally obeyed these restrictions, there have been growing clashes between the national and regional governments, reflecting Spain's deeply polarised politics. The national government has forced through restrictions in Madrid and several surrounding cities, despite strong opposition from the regional administration.
People's views on the government's handling of the pandemic tends to reflect this divide and be fairly evenly split - a recent study by the National Statistics Institute (INE) showed that 57% of Spaniards had little or no confidence in the government's response to the crisis.
The perspective from Asia. A different trajectory:
Deaths 433 | Death rate 0.8 per 100,000 people | Total cases 24,703
Life is almost back to normal thanks to a series of measures carried out with wide public support, writes Laura Bicker in Seoul.
South Korea was one of the first countries to be hit by the coronavirus. At one point it had the worst outbreak of Covid-19 outside mainland China. But within weeks, doctors and health officials managed to get the rate of infections under control from a peak of 1,000 cases a day in late February to no reported cases by the end of April.
They did this through mass testing and strict contact tracing. The country had test kits ready within two weeks of the first reported case on 20 January. Covid-19 tests have always been easily available at clinics and hospitals, and South Korea was the first to pilot drive-through testing. They even came up with space-age telephone-box test booths where the physician was behind clear screens to keep them safe from infected patients.
Contact tracing is done through surveillance. Once a case is reported, phone and bank records are pored over by tracing teams to try to find out where the infected person has been and crucially who've they've been near. Text messages are sent to everyone who may have come into contact with the virus, urging them to get a test.
This has been one of the most controversial measures, but the majority of people have accepted it and prioritised controlling the pandemic over their own privacy. There are also strict quarantine measures. Everyone in isolation must use a phone app to record their temperature and symptoms, daily. Everyone coming into the country must serve two weeks quarantine and take a test.
Going anywhere without a mask is unthinkable here. You would be the odd one out. It is mandatory on public transport and taxis. But all these measures combined have kept this country out of lockdown and the economy largely open. When infections rise, stricter measures are put in place. Schools opened in May but some were closed again after a surge in local cases. Nightclubs and karaoke bars were shut after outbreaks and have remained closed until this week. They are only allowed to reopen if they adhere to strict disinfection guidelines. At one point there was a 21:00 curfew on restaurants in the capital, Seoul. But now, social distancing guidelines are back to their lowest level. There have also been a number of financial support programmes in place.
There has been broad support for South Korea's coronavirus measures. The current administration won a landslide election in April for the first time, which most believe was due to the effective handling of the pandemic.
There are still cases reported every day, but life is almost as back to as normal as it can be. We can see friends, eat out, have drinks and travel within the country. Pupils are back at school. Whatever concerns there have been over privacy, most have seen it as a price worth paying.
Deaths 27 | Death rate 0.5 per 100,000 people | Total cases 57,866
Singapore has so far avoided the second spikes seen in Europe, writes Karishma Vaswani.
As well as the test, trace and isolate doctrine of other countries, Singapore's mandatory mask wearing, strict penalties for rule breaking, and technological tools like a "trace together" token, have helped control the virus.
The token, which can be worn on a lanyard, uses Bluetooth to look for other users' devices. It tells you if you've been in contact with someone who has been infected - so you can isolate yourself.
Singapore was the first country in the world to have a contact-tracing phone app, but the token is seen as more reliable. Initially, it was targeted at the elderly - who may not have smartphones - and young. But now everyone's being encouraged to get one.
The city-state, with a population of 5.6 million, was quick to react at the start of the pandemic, after a first round of infections sparked by tourists from Wuhan in China. Through a meticulous contact tracing and quarantine programme, numbers were kept low. As early as March, it was seen to have beaten the virus, and earned the "gold standard" moniker for its efforts. Lockdown had been avoided.
But a mass outbreak in the dormitories of low-paid migrant workers dashed those hopes. In April, Singapore went into lockdown for almost two months, costing the economy US$10bn per month in losses, according to some analysts.
Six months on, things appear to have been brought under control. But officials are more modest now about their success.
The majority of those with Covid are being housed in community isolation facilities - rather than hospitals. These are dedicated to people who aren't severely ill so don't need to be in hospital.
Key to this strategy is the opening up the economy - and ensuring that trade dependent, open-bordered Singapore can bounce back when international travel starts again. The economy is slowly restarting, and the plan is to move into the next phase of its recovery programme, by allowing more people to meet in conferences, and weddings.
Still, businesses have suffered. To help them Singapore has doled out almost $70bn in wage subsidies, loans to small- and medium-sized companies, and cash handouts to Singaporeans to supplement their living expenses.
But the government is extremely concerned about how the economy will fare as Singapore depends on external trade, tourism and travel to keep growth here strong. Officials say the economy could contract by 7% this year - the worst performance since independence.
Deputy Prime Minister Heng Swee Keat has warned the country is at a "critical juncture" in its economic development. Independent economists say Singapore's contraction could be much worse, if a vaccine isn't developed soon.
Statistics as of Saturday 10 October, from Johns Hopkins University, except France
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In his review of the national curriculum, the Education Secretary Michael Gove has said schools should emphasise the learning of key facts, arming children with essential knowledge to aid their learning - but where has he got this idea from?
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By Fran AbramsBBC Radio 4's Analysis
BBC Radio 4's Analysis explores the roots of "cultural literacy" and how it is gaining traction in England's schools.
The new intake at Pimlico Academy in London is learning a new kind of lesson. It is all based on a curriculum of hard facts, rather than of skills.
"We want children to be critical thinkers, we want them to be literate, we want them to be numerate [but] what we're doing is thinking how we achieve those ends," says Annaliese Briggs, the woman appointed to run the academy's primary school, due to open next year.
While she does not yet have a teaching qualification, we might be well advised to listen to what she has to say - because according to education secretary Michael Gove, this is the future.
"The curriculum at the moment in primary schools is often referred to as a skills-based curriculum - but I think it's much better to refer to it as a content-lite curriculum," says Briggs.
"We are developing a curriculum that specifies the knowledge that we think children need to know to develop these skills."
This idea, which has really grabbed Michael Gove and other Tories, has its origins in the USA - specifically with an 84-year-old former English literature professor, E.D. Hirsch.
Hirsch has two big ideas: First, that we all need something he calls "cultural literacy" - certain facts, ideas, literary works that he says people need to know in order to operate effectively as citizens of the country in which they live.
And second, that children need to learn these facts in a highly organised, structured way - a sort of "back to basics" education.
Cultural have-nots
The story of cultural literacy started around 20 years ago when Hirsch was working as a college lecturer in Richmond, Virginia - close to where General Robert Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant during the American Civil War.
Hirsch was struck by something about his students - particularly those who came from poorer backgrounds.
"The critical reason that I got into education reform was the strange inability of some community college students - most of them black - to be able to read simple passages about the American Civil War," Hirsch explains.
"The black students could do very well when the topics were about 'Why I like my room mate' and 'Why I don't like traffic on Route 29,' and so on, but they did very badly when it came to 'Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House' - which was shaking to me because it took place in Richmond."
"It wasn't that they lacked reading ability. It wasn't even that their vocabularies were excessively small - it was just basic factual information they lacked, which would enable them to understand what they read."
What Hirsch had hit upon was a notion which is now pretty much universally accepted: While some people grow up in homes where all sorts of cultural knowledge is common currency - history, art, literature - others do not.
When those who lack that cultural knowledge find themselves in the midst of a conversation about the American Civil War, or Rodin's sculptures, they feel lost.
Hirsch set about defining the most important background knowledge needed so that the cultural "have-nots" could become "haves". His subsequent book Cultural Literacy became a US best-seller.
The debate about what American children need to know - in order for social justice to be achieved - has been filtering across the Atlantic for a couple of decades, but is now starting to gain some real traction.
A series of books based on Hirsch's thinking are now being published by Civitas, a right-leaning think tank.
But Daisy Christodoulou, managing director of the Curriculum Centre, which is working to promote these ideas in schools across England, says these are not necessarily right-wing concepts.
"I think that if you look back through the historical contours of this debate, that generally it's the left who realise that knowledge is power - that equal access and entitlement to knowledge is so important."
Working class ideal
She is working with the Pimlico Academy primary school and talks with great passion about the way in which, for her, Hirsch's work fits with a proud working class tradition.
"Plenty of trade unionists and plenty of the early members of the Labour movement recognised this too," she says.
Christodoulou references Robert Tressell's The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists - an inspirational early labour movement text - and says it has some parallels with Hirsch's ideas.
"I think you see very clearly the similar ideas that Hirsch is talking about, that there is a common heritage of knowledge and every pupil, every citizen in this country, has a right to share in that knowledge."
Daisy Christodoulou's father was an immigrant from Cyprus: "He remembers going to school in the East End and very often not knowing what they were talking about," she says.
"He didn't want me to have that experience at school. He wanted me to be able to go into school and to know what was going on."
Christodoulou certainly embodies Hirsch's idea that factual knowledge is the route to educational success.
In 2007 she was on the winning team on University Challenge - in fact she answered so many questions over the series that there were headlines in the papers asking "Is Daisy Britain's Brightest Student?"
But not everyone agrees with her that Hirsch is the product of a long, proud, left-wing tradition. In fact, according to Hirsch himself, people on the left started to attack his ideas almost as soon as he had articulated them.
In reality, modern-day followers of Hirsch are much more likely to be found on the right of the political spectrum than on the left.
Among them is Conservative MP Nick Gibb, who was, until the recent reshuffle, schools minister in England. He sees Hirsch as a kind of antidote to the kind of left-wing romanticism he believes has really got a grip on the national curriculum.
"If you just look at, for example, the history curriculum, it's all about sorts of skills... essentially constructing historical narratives, explanations," he says.
"I've seen a history lesson where they had a portrait of Henry VII on the interactive white board and they had to intuit from that piece of evidence things about Henry VII.
"Children were coming up with things like 'Henry VII must have been rich' and 'he was full of himself' and I don't think that's a very good use of time in a tight timetable at school. They really ought to be learning the actual knowledge - the story of the history."
Mr Gibb agrees with Hirsch that all children should have the opportunity to learn the same set of core facts about their society.
"The essence of what Hirsch is talking about is: It's not just any knowledge, it's only that knowledge which constitutes the shared intellectual currency of the society."
More knowledge, less individuality
Curriculum expert Prof Andrew Pollard disagrees. He does not accept the former minister's view that lessons in English schools are "content-lite".
"I'm sure you can find examples of that sort, just as you can find examples of cramming of knowledge," he says.
"It's a very wide-ranging system and I think there's no doubt that more emphasis on knowledge and facts and so forth is not necessarily a bad idea - but I don't think caricatures of practice help us greatly."
The debate about Hirsch is a polarised one, but Sir Michael Barber, formerly Tony Blair's chief adviser on policy implementation and now chief education adviser at the educational publisher Pearson, says there is a third way.
"The road to hell in education is paved with false dichotomies. If you think of knowledge as two aspects - knowing content, knowing information, and then also knowing how to do something.
"Take Pythagoras' Theorem. Is that knowledge or skills? It's not really useful unless you can apply Pythagoras' Theorem when you need to with a mathematical problem - and that's knowing how.
"Knowing what and knowing how - knowledge and skills - go together."
But Education Secretary Michael Gove is certainly keen to inject more of Hirsch into English schools. He told MPs earlier this year that far from seeing these ideas as old-fashioned, he expected schools to embrace them.
Mr Gove says he does not want to force schools to adopt Hirsch's ideas - but some members of the expert panel set up to provide advice on his curriculum review think that is just what he is doing.
Prof Andrew Pollard was one of the panel's four members. It came up with a perfectly sensible conclusion: education is the product of interaction between knowledge and individual development.
But Mr Gove and Mr Gibb did not entirely agree with that. They want more of the knowledge and less of the individual development. And they want it laid out as Hirsch recommends - in specific, year-by-year detail.
And, according to Prof Pollard, the notion that teachers should have freedom to decide when children should learn what, and how, was rejected.
"I think it's curious that despite this focus on knowledge, ministers so show such a cavalier disregard for research evidence from the UK and across the world," he says.
"This research is largely consistent in saying that the key factor in high quality education, in raising standards, is the input of teachers and their capacity to deploy their expertise."
Sir Michael Barber has just published a paper on schools around the world. He found that the people who think the curriculum is the answer, are asking the wrong question.
"In Britain and the US there's a tendency to assume that a child is either born so-called 'clever' or not, and then the school system just discovers whether that's true or not, " he says - noting that it is different in Asia, home to some of the highest education standards in the world.
"In Pacific-Asia they assume that every child can learn this content through hard work - with parental support and good teaching.
"We see very passionate, committed teachers and parents who believe that their children can succeed regardless of their background.
"That means that they get more children making more progress and they have less of an equity gap than we have in Britain or has traditionally been the case in the United States."
However, Sir Michael does not completely dismiss Hirsch.
"Cultural literacy is important too and if you don't know those key facts in the society you live in, you're permanently disadvantaged. I think that is a key fact."
Listen to the full report on BBC Radio 4's Analysis. Listen again on the Radio 4 website or the Analysis podcast.
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Students at Kenya's Garissa university awoke on Thursday morning to the sound of gunmen prowling the campus, shooting at their classmates. Nearly 150 people were killed in what would become the deadliest attack yet by al-Shabab militants in Kenya.
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"All I could hear were footsteps and gunshots," student Collins Wetangula told the Associated Press news agency. "Nobody was screaming because they thought this would lead the gunmen to where they are."
"The gunmen were saying, 'Sisi ni al-Shabab,'" he said - Swahili for "We are al-Shabab."
The raid began at dawn - about 0530 local time (0230 GMT). Two Toyota Probox cars drove up to the university gates, according to Kenyan daily newspaper The Star. Five gunmen got out, wearing masks and jungle-style fatigues, the paper says.
They shot dead two guards at the gate and entered the campus. A labourer named Boaz Muanja told The Star he initially mistook the gunmen for police officers - until they began firing in his direction.
A student said she too mistook the armed men for police when she went to check on an explosion at the gates. "All of a sudden I saw them throw explosives... where the Christian Union members were praying," she said.
Inside the dormitories, the students realised they were under attack.
"We were asleep… when we heard several gunshots outside the hostel," said Augustine Alanga, an economics student interviewed by the BBC's Newsday radio programme.
Many of the students escaped, he said. Those who were left behind were taken hostage by the gunmen.
"It was horrible, my life was in danger… they were shooting at us with live bullets," he said. "Everywhere all over the school compound was gunfire."
An unnamed witness, interviewed by Reuters TV, also spoke of being awoken by the sound of firing. "Guys started jumping up and down, running for their lives," he said.
But some of the students ended up "going to where the gunshots were coming from". The others, he said, escaped to open ground and eventually fled the campus.
Mr Wetangula, the vice chairman of the university students' union, told the Associated Press news agency that he was preparing for a shower when he heard the gunshots. He immediately locked himself in a room with three other students.
He says he heard the attackers opening doors and asking people if they were Muslim or Christians. "If you were a Christian, you were shot on the spot," he said. "With each blast of the gun, I thought I was going to die."
He said the shooting became more intense, apparently as the gunmen themselves came under fire.
The students left the room when men in military uniform appeared at one of the windows, identifying themselves as Kenyan soldiers.
But Mr Wetangula said the escape was far from smooth. "We started running and bullets were whizzing past our heads... The soldiers told us to dive."
Later, he said, a soldier told him that al-Shabab snipers had been firing from the roof of a dormitory.
Another student said he noticed that the attackers were fully covered, "leaving just a slit for their eyes". He said he helped a group of students escape by jumping onto chairs placed outside open windows.
Outside the university, Kenyan journalist Dennis Okari tweeted that he had been told to take cover amid the sound of heavy gunfire and explosions. "Hundreds of students run out, some crawling," he wrote.
Kenya's security forces say the militants were eventually surrounded in a dormitory. Four of them died, apparently as their suicide vests were detonated. The fifth gunman was captured alive.
The attack is the bloodiest yet on Kenyan soil by al-Shabab militants, based in neighbouring Somalia. A female student told Al Jazeera that she had stepped over more bodies than she could count as she escaped.
James Karubiu, the father of a student, told the BBC that he had searched for his daughter in a mortuary, fearing she was dead because he could not get through to her mobile phone.
When she eventually sent him a text message, he learnt that she had spent 10 hours hidden in a closet. "She was just peeping, and seeing how people were being killed like animals," he said.
Many Kenyans are asking if the attack could have been anticipated, and if more could have been done to protect the university.
Grace Kai, a student at a nearby teachers training college, said strangers spotted earlier in Garissa town were suspected to have been terrorists. The college principal had also warned of strangers having entered the college, she told Reuters news agency.
But another witness, who gave his name as Geremano, told the BBC's Outside Source that students had told him they had not expected an attack on the university.
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Irfan Masih was clearing a blocked sewer in Pakistan's Sindh Province when he was overcome by toxic fumes. The 30-year-old, who is Christian, died in hospital. His family say that doctors initially refused to treat him and allege he is a victim of growing discrimination from the Muslim majority. The BBC's Riaz Sohail in Umarkot and M Ilyas Khan in Islamabad report.
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When Irfan Masih was sent with two colleagues to clear a sewer that had been blocked for four months on Chhor road in Umarkot town, he could not have foreseen that his life was about to end.
His cousin Pervez, a sanitary worker like Irfan, said he was heading to work on 1 June when he heard about the incident.
"I rushed straight to the spot where some people were gathered. They had already pulled out Shaukat Masih, who was unconscious. I helped bring out Yaqoob and Irfan."
Shaukat Masih had been sent down to rescue the two. Irfan was deepest down the sewer well.
"Irfan was breathing, sometimes choking a bit. I lifted him on my shoulder and started running towards the hospital when an auto rickshaw pulled over to help me carry him.
The Taluka Headquarters Hospital in Umarkot is a small one, with only one emergency room where all three were taken. Six doctors deal with 600 outpatient and emergency cases every day.
One doctor came in, looked at Irfan and told the ward boy to clean him, Pervez Masih said. "I pleaded with him that Irfan was seriously ill and he must examine him right away. But he said he was fasting [for Ramadan], and that Irfan was covered in sewage filth. He went away."
After some time, the hospital's chief doctor arrived, he says, followed a while later by another. Neither doctor tended to the injured sanitary worker, although Pervez Masih says the second doctor told the ward boy to put him on oxygen.
"The ward boy did not wash Irfan as he was told. He continued to try to insert a cannula in Irfan's wrist but couldn't find a vein.
"All this while, I was fretting and pleading with one member of staff after another to attend to Irfan. Then I cleaned his face a bit and put my mouth on his mouth and nose and blew in to revive him.
"All this time, Irfan was breathing. Occasionally a shiver would run down his body, like someone having an epileptic fit.
"We must have been there for half an hour before he died. The last time I breathed into his mouth and nose, he pulled in a deep breath and choked a little."
It was only then that the ward boy brought the oxygen and put the mask on his mouth, he said, but there did not appear to be any oxygen in the cylinder. Minutes later a fourth doctor, Hanif Aresar, came in.
"He didn't mind the filth, just went down and embraced him and turned him on his stomach, and back on his back, and tried to resuscitate him manually. Then he said it was no use. Irfan was gone. "
Irfan was Christian, like most sanitary workers in Pakistan. Some low-caste Hindus also do the job, but Muslims avoid this work because they see it as beneath them.
Christians also face discrimination in this Muslim-majority nation. So too do Hindus, but in Umarkot there is a Hindu population of half a million, making them an influential group. There are only a small number of Christians, however, and they have no meaningful representation in the local government.
Who are Pakistan's Christians?
Dr Jam Kumbhar, the chief of the hospital, denies allegations that doctors refused to touch the three workers unless they were washed or that one said he was fasting (with the possible implication that he was short-tempered as a result).
He says Irfan Masih "was already dead when they brought him in," despite his cousin Pervez's detailed account of the man's last moments.
"I am a Muslim and a doctor, and part of our training is to understand that all patients are equal and we must not entertain prejudice against anyone," Dr Kumbhar told the BBC.
"I did not utter these words, nor did I hear any other doctor say that he was fasting and that he would touch the patient only after the patient was given a bath."
The BBC asked to see the entry register which lists each patient brought in to the emergency room and their medical condition. Dr Kumbhar said they couldn't find it because it had been taken away by local Christians.
Local journalist Nahid Hussain Khatak, who reached the hospital about 10 minutes after Irfan Masih, corroborates much of Pervez Masih's account.
"He had been seen by the doctors. If they thought he was dead, why would they put a cannula in his arm or give him oxygen?"
A picture taken by Pervez Masih appears to show his brother with a cannula in his arm.
Dr Kumbhar accused the Christians of turning violent.
"They were armed with sticks and were also carrying acid in bottles. They broke things at the hospital. The lives of the doctors were in danger."
The hospital administration has made a formal request to the authorities to lodge a case of terrorism against 13 members of the Christian community.
Nahid Hussain Khatak says the violence alleged "wasn't even a fraction of what the hospital administration have said".
"Someone opened the fridge in the emergency room and found it stocked with fruit (for doctors and paramedics to eat after their fast) instead of medicine, and pulled it to the ground. They smashed up a couple of tables but it was over in minutes as everybody stormed out to hold a protest."
Far from going after the Christian protesters, police are investigating the three doctors at the hospital who are accused of negligence and involuntary homicide. Dr Kumbhar was arrested and released on bail.
Pressure for a police complaint mounted when the Christian community staged their demonstration, attracting media attention.
Pervez Masih does admit he and others were angry.
"I lost my mind. Shaukat and Yaqoob were also in a serious state. So there was mayhem in the emergency room. Someone pulled down a refrigerator, a table or two were overturned, some windowpanes were broken."
But he says they left with Irfan Mashi's body when police told them to calm down.
"We took the dead body straight to the town square where we staged a sit-in for seven hours, and left only after the district administration high-ups assured us that justice would be done."
It was this anger, he believes, that convinced police to lodge a complaint against the three doctors, and that convinced the hospital staff to immediately arrange to transfer the two other Christian men to hospitals in Hyderabad and then Karachi.
"Shaukat has revived, but Yaqoob is still in a serious condition," Pervez says.
Locals say at least two other Christian sanitary workers lost their lives cleaning the same sewer three years ago.
Mir Hasan Aresar, a columnist and social worker, says there have been examples of intolerance towards minorities in this area. "Tolerance is diminishing, and it's worrying," he said.
The government has announced compensation of a million rupees ($15,000, £12,200) to the family of Irfan Masih, but his mother, Arshad Bibi, is not content.
"I want justice. I want the doctors to be punished so that this doesn't happen to another poor family."
His father, Nazeer, said the first doctor did discriminate against Irfan and the others.
"He said he was fasting, and the patients were dirty. His clothes would get soiled, he said. He asked us to wash the patients before he could treat them.
"They hate us. They don't allow us to sit next to them because we are sweepers. The politicians came here because the case was highlighted in the media. Otherwise, no-one bothers."
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A section of a guided busway will be closed for almost a week after a bus crashed off the tracks, went through a hedge and ended up in a field.
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The driver sustained minor injuries but no passengers were hurt in the accident at Longstanton in Cambridgeshire on Thursday morning.
The incident would be a matter for the Health and Safety Executive to look into, police said.
Part of the track will be closed until Wednesday.
The bus appears to have careered off the track near the Longstanton park and ride site and travelled about 15m (49ft) from the track, through a hedge and into a field.
A spokeswoman for bus operator Stagecoach East said no passengers were injured and an investigation would take place.
Cambridgeshire Police said the bus driver sustained minor injuries.
The East of England Ambulance Service said no-one needed hospital treatment.
The county council confirmed a section of the guided track would remain closed until Wednesday.
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