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The death of a man found in a park is no longer being treated as a murder investigation, police have said.
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Daniel Sullivan, 38, died shortly after police were called to St George's Avenue, next to Northampton's Racecourse, on 30 June.
Two men, aged 33 and 43, had been arrested on suspicion of murder but were later released.
Northamptonshire Police said it believes no-one else was involved in Mr Sullivan's death.
The case would now be passed to the coroner.
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A man has been charged with murdering a disability rights campaigner at her home in Eastbourne.
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The body of Jackie Hoadley, 58, was found dead at home in Broad Oak Close on Sunday.
Sussex Police said Raymond Hoadley, 62, of Willowfield Road, Eastbourne, had been charged with her murder.
The force said arrangements were being made for a virtual court hearing and Mr Hoadley was expected to appear before Lewes Crown Court on Friday.
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Andrei Ostapovich was a high-flying young police investigator in Belarus when protests broke out earlier this year, in the wake of the country's disputed presidential election. He was so horrified by the beating and torture of demonstrators in custody that he left the country. He's one of hundreds of Belarusian police officers now in exile in Poland and the Baltic states.
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By Lucy AshBBC News, Warsaw
Sitting on a Warsaw park bench in the autumn sunlight, Andrei Ostapovich is lost in thought. He's oblivious to the couples strolling past, to the laughing teenagers and to the grandmother and toddler feeding the ducks a few metres away. With his sharp cheekbones and olive green eyes, the 27-year-old could almost be mistaken for a guy modelling Italian knitwear or promoting an expensive brand of aftershave. But Andrei is a policeman on the run.
Strictly speaking, Andrei is not running any more - he feels relatively safe in Poland. But when he decided to quit his job as a high-flying detective in the Belarusian capital, Minsk this summer, he realised he would have to leave the country straight away or risk arrest.
"I've been in police uniform for the past 10 years," he says. "But after the elections in August, I thought I was no longer safe wearing it because of the way people now feel about the police. My uniform made me ashamed"
Brought up in the Grodno region, near the Polish border, Andrei's bravery and quick wittedness was first spotted when, aged 15, he saved a younger boy from drowning in a lake. Local firemen and paramedics were so impressed by the rescue that they suggested he might like a job with them after he left school.
But Andrei had other plans. After five years at an academy attached to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, where he studied law and forensics, he qualified as an investigator. He began with probes into medical negligence and just three months after graduation he made a name for himself by catching a notorious paedophile. He soon moved on to some of the country's most complex murder cases.
"The job was really exciting," he tells me, sucking hard on a cigarette. "There were interesting cases in which the suspects proved elusive and it was such a thrill when you managed to outsmart them - like winning a game of chess."
He says there was little political interference in his work as a senior investigator. But as elections approached he was troubled by the arrest of presidential candidates - a banker, Viktor Babaryko and blogger Sergei Tikhanovsky - on the flimsiest of pretexts.
Official results after the 9 August poll gave Alexander Lukashenko a landslide victory and a sixth term in office. But many both inside and outside Belarus were certain that the voting had been rigged. People took to the streets in unprecedented numbers demanding the resignation of the former collective farm boss who has ruled the country for the last 26 years.
Andrei went to the rallies after work to see what was going on. He found himself running for cover as police fired rubber bullets and stun grenades into the crowd.
What he saw with his own eyes - and in videos posted online - sickened him. So although he loved his job, he wrote a five-page letter of resignation, detailing all the abuses he'd witnessed, stating that the riot police "were the only people who provoked violence" and claiming that they had executed "criminal orders". Fully aware that he might face arrest, he fled across the border to Russia.
Very soon the Russian security services, the FSB, showed up at his hotel in the city of Pskov. "They put handcuffs on me and a ski mask covered with black cloth," says Andrei. "Then they attached a dumbbell to the handcuffs - it was so heavy, more than 30kg of metal. I thought they might throw me in the lake with this dead weight, and I wouldn't be able to swim. When you can't see anything, you have no idea what's going on."
The FSB officers, who did not introduce themselves, drove for four hours to the Belarusian border. Then they stopped, took Andrei out of the car, and removed his mask and handcuffs.
"The FSB tried to act like they were not involved in my arrest," he says. "They gave me back my things and told me to walk along the road. I saw some [Belarusian] KGB agents approaching so I didn't hang about, I ran into the forest," says Andrei. "They chased me but they couldn't keep up, so I managed to escape."
Dressed in no more than his jeans, trainers and a T-shirt, Andrei sought refuge among thick forests of pine and birch, lakes and treacherous marshes. He immediately threw away his three mobile phones, to avoid being traced. He had no food apart from some chocolate bars and a bottle of water. Once he slipped into a swamp up to his waist and couldn't move his legs. Fortunately he was able to reach some thick reeds, but it took all his strength to haul himself out.
Then there was a close encounter with a wild boar - "a huge beast with tusks", he says. "I managed to dazzle it with my torch and it ran off but it was very scary being alone at night in the forest."
After 10 days of wandering in circles and getting hopelessly lost, Andrei eventually reached Poland, where he applied for asylum.
According to Evgeny Yushkevich, a former senior Belarusian police investigator now in Lithuania, at least 350 men and women from the police and other law enforcement bodies have resigned from their jobs.
Together with activists who helped supply hospitals with food and protective equipment when Covid first struck last spring, he launched a scheme to help people in Andrei's situation. Bysol, which stands for Belarusian Solidarity, offers financial and legal support for police and other state employees who left their posts in protest against state sponsored violence and election fraud.
Mikita Mikado, who founded a software company in Minsk called Panda Doc and later moved to Silicon Valley, came up with a similar initiative. His project, ProtectBelarus.org, offers retraining in the tech industry for Belarusian police officers who refused orders to attack protesters. "I appeal to Belarusian security officials," the tech entrepreneur wrote on his Instagram account, "if you want to be on the side of good, but finances do not allow, write — I will help." Soon afterwards, the site said it had received 594 applications from police officers.
Apart from offering ex-cops pathways to new careers, Mikado said he would help to pay off loans. Belarusian police are effectively "indentured employees" because they are paid upfront at the beginning of their contract, so when they break it they are immediately in debt to the state.
Andrei, however, who repaid the state without Mikado's help, doesn't plan on retraining because he wants to go home as soon as possible.
He's in contact with the exiled opposition leader, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya - the woman many Belarusians now consider their legitimate president - and hopes one day to help her end a culture of violence in Belarusian law enforcement. The response to the protests was just the most extreme example of a tendency to violence that had always existed, he says.
"I think it's a kind of herd instinct," he says. "In police departments there are sinks used to wash away blood - the floor can get soaked with blood. So they call the place near the sink the Wailing Wall. I don't know if they think all this is funny or not, but after doing horrible things to people they'd sit with their mates and chat and laugh… it looked like pure sadism to me. I know they enjoyed it, the excitement and the adrenaline."
He adds that many police and special forces officers have signed papers which absolve them of responsibility for their actions, as they are supposedly protecting the state at a time of crisis.
According to human rights groups, to date, more than 19,000 people have been arrested, thousands have been beaten and some horrifically tortured in police stations and detention centres.
I asked the Belarusian Interior Ministry's spokeswoman Olga Chemodanova to comment on these numbers and the allegations of mistreatment. She wrote back to say she was not yet in a position to comment.
Some in the opposition believe that one way to disempower the security services is to expose and shame them individually, either by physically pulling the balaclavas from their faces - or, more controversially, by uploading on social media any photographs they can get hold of. Names, addresses and phone numbers are often published too.
"One of the best tactics against the police and Omon is not open warfare, fighting on the streets," says Stepan Svetlov, the 22-year-old founder of a channel on the social messaging app, Telegram, that has helped to co-ordinate the Belarusian protests.
"Instead we are fighting an information war. We have to keep up the psychological pressure on them and on their families because it does have an effect."
Svetlov's channel is called Nexta, meaning "someone", and sitting in his small Warsaw office he tells me that it gets the data about these officers in leaks from whistleblowers or "cyber-partisans" inside government ministries.
But Andrei Ostapovich argues that attempts to publicly shame police officers could increase their determination to crush the protests with violence.
"They know they are tied to this current government and if it gets changed, they would end up in court," he says. "When citizens start insulting the riot police, calling them 'inhuman and fascists', they are under constant negative pressure and they become even more aggressive."
President Lukashenko appears to agree. Although he has hinted in the last few days that he could step down, he recently warned some Russian journalists that if he fell, the country would fall with him, including those who protect him.
"Guys in the Omon, the riot police and many others, like that guard sitting over there", he said pointing to his security guard. "Why should they be blamed? And yet they would be slaughtered - torn to pieces - if I'm forced out."
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Hanna Kostseva was in court when her two brothers, Stanislaw and Ilya, aged 19 and 21, were sentenced to death for murder. She and her mother will never find out when they were shot, or where they were buried.
'My brothers on Europe's last death row' (June 2020)
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Adrian Mole, the angst-ridden diarist created by the late Sue Townsend, reaches his 50th birthday on 2 April. His diaries, over eight volumes, made Townsend one of the best-selling British authors of recent decades. But what made the character so compelling?
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By Liam BarnesBBC News
Stephen Mangan, actor
Stephen Mangan played Mole in the 2001 TV adaption of Townsend's The Cappuccino Years and worked closely with the writer on bringing him to life on screen.
Now aged 48, he began reading the Secret Diary as a teenager.
"Obviously when you read it as a 13 or 14-year-old you miss some of the nuances, but what's so clever about the books is that you get so many different perspectives," he says.
"It's written from the point of view of a 13-year-old boy, but it's also there's the story of [his separating] parents. It's a very clever trick, because through his lack of awareness you learn so much about marriage, parenting and life.
"A lot of the poignancy and depth of the book is revealed to you later when you're a little bit older."
Mole's waspish observations of the politics of the day are another feature of Townsend's books. He criticises Margaret Thatcher, the Falklands War and - in later editions - New Labour and Tony Blair.
"Sue was very engaged politically and socially tuned in to what was going on, and Adrian was her way in to discuss that," Mangan adds.
"She deals with big cultural phenomena through the books and with characters you love and sympathise with.
"We can be very entrenched in our attitudes, and with comedy, especially one based on a dweeby and nerdy loser like Adrian, bypasses this.
"We still read Jane Austen today, despite those books being a satire of the social scene at the time - if it's done with that amount of wit, warmth and intelligence it becomes universal."
Nina Stibbe, author
In the early 1980s, while Mole was worrying about his spots and dreaming about his beloved Pandora, author Nina Stibbe was leaving their hometown of Leicester for London.
Then a young nanny - and now a successful novelist in her own right - she instantly recognised the problems occupying Mole.
"I read it when it first came out and - although I was 19 not 13 and had just moved to London - it was interesting because it was like a vindication," she says.
"He was neurotic, he was anxious, but he didn't mind about it, he just got on with worrying, and it was the same stuff that I was worrying about.
"He was worrying about his family, his mother's drinking and promiscuity, and I think it was the first time there was a character doing this sort of thing in such a charming way."
Stibbe's collection of letters Love, Nina chronicles her time observing the London literary scene of the 1980s (she was employed as a nanny by Kay Wilmers, editor of the London Review of Books, and frequent visitors to the houses included Alan Bennett and Jonathan Miller).
"When the first diary came out I was living in London, I was a nanny, and I was around all these very accomplished writers and playwrights, and they were all loving [Mole]," she adds.
"I think people can identify with him - the way he worries about things that might go wrong is something that affects us all, whether it's health or what's happening next year.
"I wrote about divorce once, and I thought about [Mole's parents] George and Pauline's marriage, because it's so interestingly done - my parents had lots of friends like that.
"It was all so real, and Sue was writing from experience. The main thing is that it's hilarious, that's the nub and the magic of it."
Louise Moore, publisher
Louise Moore grew up reading the Mole diaries - and years later wrote a fan letter to Townsend which led to a long-lasting friendship.
When Townsend asked Moore to publish The Cappuccino Years, in which Mole has a brief stint as a celebrity chef before moving back to his native Leicestershire, she described it as "like winning the Lottery".
"I'd just left school [when I read the Secret Diary...] and I loved it," she said.
"It's the quintessential humour that I love.
She says Mole's "everyman" qualities kept fans on his side throughout his struggles with life.
"Sue was very clear that she didn't want Adrian to grow up and be unappealing," she adds.
"She knew him so well, she'd said that when she was writing other books she'd start to think about him, and he followed her through her life.
"He was her mouthpiece in a way. He's very ridiculous and naïve, but he also has a great wisdom and empathy for the human condition.
"He quietly triumphs in the face of almost constant adversity - he's one of the world's unsung, ordinary heroes."
Dr Corinne Fowler, University of Leicester
Leicester is the backdrop for much of the Mole books, but it's importance to the character - and Townsend - is often overlooked, says Dr Corinne Fowler, an associate professor at the University of Leicester.
"Sue was very connected to the region," she says.
"At her funeral one of the actors who was involved in the first production said she insisted she took the local actors with her when it transferred to London because of her commitment to the local arts scene.
"Apparently there were a few references to Leicester in the early manuscripts, but it seems the editor must have asked them to be removed. I think that tells you something about literary culture... anywhere outside London risked being seen as parochial if it includes the local references for a region. Later on I would imagine she had that authority to put those [references] in."
Mole's appeal has always been much wider, though, and to mark his half-century, three new radio plays featuring the character have been commissioned by the university's Centre for New Writing.
"[Townsend] would have had a field day with Brexit," adds Dr Fowler. "She would have given a voice to the grievances of the Remainers and the political developments across the decade.
"But I think it's interesting how it transcends places. Much of it's a comment on Thatcher's Britain, about growing up in poverty in the UK, about so many national things pertinent to the UK.
"So it's incredible to have someone growing up in Sao Paulo, for example, and understanding and liking it."
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Spready Mercury and Gritty Gritty Bang Bang will be taking to Cumbria's roads this winter after being chosen among the new names for the county's fleet of gritters.
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They will join David Ploughie, Usain Salt and Gritany Spears.
Eleven of the authority's 38 gritters are to be given names following Twitter polls run by Cumbria County Council.
Suggestions which were not selected included Brad Grit, Bay Gritty Roller and Nitty Gritty.
The list of winning names also included Gritter Garbo, Gritty McVitie, Ready Spready Go, True Grit, Nicole Saltslinger and Whinlatter Scatter.
Two-hundred monikers were initially put forward.
A number of councils across the country have conducted similar public votes.
Last month Shropshire Council announced Gritty McGritface and Frosty the Snow Van were among its winners.
Related Internet Links
Cumbria County Council
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Labour's Brexit bind is not hard to grasp.
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By Ben WrightPolitical correspondent, BBC News
The vast majority of Labour MPs campaigned to keep Britain in the EU. But most now represent constituencies that voted to leave.
And as Parliament prepares to vote on triggering divorce talks with Brussels, Labour MPs are being ordered to approve the start of Brexit by a party leader who spent his backbench career ignoring similar demands for discipline.
These are agonising days for a parliamentary party struggling to maintain a coherent position on the biggest issue facing British politics for a generation.
Three-line whip
Let's start with Jeremy Corbyn's decision to impose what, in parliamentary parlance, is called a three-line whip.
As far as the political parties in Westminster are concerned, MPs are not sent to Parliament to carefully weigh up each issue and vote according to their own judgement or conscience.
No, they are there to vote as their party leadership tells them to. Over the weekend, all MPs will receive a letter from their party's whips office telling them how to vote on various Bills before the Commons next week.
The most important by far will be the Second Reading of the bill to trigger Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty.
It will not be the end of the parliamentary process for the Bill (a Committee stage will follow the week after and the Lords needs to approve it too) but it's a big moment.
And in the letter Labour MPs will receive, the name of the bill will be underlined three times. That means they must vote as their party managers instruct - no ifs, no buts.
In this case, they must vote to support the government's plan to trigger Article 50 by the end of March.
Personal discomfort
It's an instruction that gives Labour MPs no wiggle-room or freedom to vote according to their conscience. Of course, Labour MPs can choose to ignore the instruction but for backbenchers that would normally mean a big black mark against their name by the party whips and for front benchers such insubordination would mean resignation or the sack.
So why has Mr Corbyn decided to issue a three-line whip on Article 50?
First, he has made it clear Labour will respect the result of the referendum and not block the start of Brexit in Parliament. Mr Corbyn believes it is imperative his party has a clear position on the issue.
For him personally, triggering Article 50 may not cause too much discomfort. He campaigned for Remain but has been an EU sceptic most of his political life.
But there are obvious political considerations at play too. Roughly two thirds of parliamentary constituencies represented by Labour MPs voted to leave the EU.
As the shadow home secretary Diane Abbott said: "You have to remember how this looks to people in post-industrial Britain, former mining areas, the North, the Midlands, south Wales - it would look as if elites were refusing to listen to them".
Swathes of Labour's traditional working-class heartlands voted to leave the EU and the leadership believes the party must stand firmly behind their decision.
There are imminent electoral tests for Labour too: By-elections in Copeland and Stoke on Trent.
'Capital of Brexit'
Stoke voted to leave the EU by 69.4% and UKIP's leader Paul Nuttall is running in the city he is describing as the "capital of Brexit".
If the Labour leadership was to look flaky on the question of triggering Brexit, the party could give up on holding Stoke Central now.
And as Labour MPs who represent similar seats look ahead to the next general election they will make the same calculation.
I've spoken to former Labour ministers who passionately believe that leaving the EU will be bad for Britain, but feel they must respect the referendum result.
And if they want to keep their seats, they have little choice.
However, there is a second category of Labour MPs with a very different perspective.
According to BBC research, about 70 Labour MPs represent constituencies that voted to remain in the EU.
Going feral?
Just four of those MPs campaigned to leave (including Kate Hoey in Vauxhall and Gisela Stuart in Birmingham Edgbaston) which means dozens of Labour MPs who wanted to keep Britain in the EU represent seats that voted the same way.
And many of them look set to defy Jeremy Corbyn's orders on Article 50. Even two Labour whips - Jeff Smith and Thangam Debbonaire - have said they will refuse to vote in favour of the Article 50 Bill, in a bizarre show of parliamentary self-flagellation.
It seems likely a number of front bench and even shadow cabinet Labour MPs will do the same. The question is, whether Mr Corbyn sacks them or allows some tacit elasticity.
As one Labour MP said to me this week, party discipline on the issue is rapidly breaking down and MPs were going "feral".
Mr Corbyn rebelled against the Labour whip 428 times during Labour's years in power and it's clear many of his MPs aren't cowed by calls for party discipline now.
Remember too, polls conducted before the referendum showed a large majority of Labour Party members were strongly in favour of remaining in the EU. They will be making their views felt at constituency meetings.
In the end, the government will get its Article 50 Bill through Parliament with ease. Even if dozens of Labour MPs join other opposition parties and vote against the bill or abstain, the government seems certain to secure a hefty majority.
But the choice being weighed up by Labour MPs goes to the heart of what Members of Parliament are for.
In this case, is it to endorse the decision of a national referendum? Is it to reflect the wishes of their constituents? Is it support the position of their party in Parliament?
Or is to judge, individually, what they think is in the best interests of the country? Perhaps not since the Iraq vote in 2003 have Labour MPs faced such a testing decision.
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For some former Jehovah's Witnesses, leaving the faith is not just the mark of losing your religion - it can also mean losing your loved ones. In many cases, friends and family are told to cut all ties with ex-believers, leaving them isolated and sometimes suicidal.
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By Monica SorianoVictoria Derbyshire programme
"I don't speak to any of my family," Sarah - not her real name - tells the BBC's Victoria Derbyshire programme.
"Because of being 'disfellowshipped', I can have no contact."
Last year, Sarah - in her 20s - was excluded by the Jehovah's Witnesses in a process known as "disfellowshipping", she says sparked by her refusal to live in an abusive relationship.
She claims her partner at the time had been violent towards her, at one stage leaving her with broken ribs.
'Remove the wicked'
Going to the police - and involving those from outside the religion - is heavily discouraged by Jehovah's Witnesses, she says, claiming that elders within the faith refused to punish her ex-partner's behaviour.
It was only when work colleagues noticed the bruising, and convinced her not to put up with the abuse, that she says she fled the relationship.
Sarah claims she was consequently disfellowshipped by the religion, and that her friends and family cut all ties with her.
This is because Jehovah's Witnesses believe those outside the religion can be of detriment to their faith.
In a statement the religious group told the BBC: "If a baptised Witness makes a practice of breaking the Bible's moral code, and does not given evidence of stopping the practice, he or she will be shunned or disfellowshipped.
"When it comes to shunning, Witnesses take their instructions from the Bible and on this subject the Bible clearly states, 'Remove the wicked man from amongst yourselves.'"
The night she was disfellowshipped, Sarah says her mother refused to talk to her. Her father woke her up at 07:00 to kick her out of their home.
Responding to Sarah's claims, the Jehovah's Witnesses said that while it could not comment on individual cases, "violence, whether physical or emotional, is strongly condemned in the Bible and has no place in a Christian family".
John - not his real name - became a Jehovah's Witness as a young child when his parents decided to join the religious group.
But two years ago, he was disfellowshipped after he missed a Jehovah's Witness memorial service - seen in the religion as an important event.
He had also begun to privately have doubts about some of the religion's teachings - questioning the faith's assertion that the end of the world is imminent, and that only 144,000 human beings will go to heaven.
His view on the religion was also tarnished after ones of his friends died, when a blood transfusion - which is not allowed in the faith - might have saved him.
"It was a waste of a life," he says.
John says he later discovered his wife had testified against him during the process that led to his disfellowship, which he believes placed a great strain on their relationship.
He left the family home - living temporarily in tents and caravans.
"It was a very isolating time. I didn't have anyone, I felt quite suicidal," he says.
He has now lost contact with his two adult children and siblings.
"Sometimes I send them a message saying, 'I love you, I'm still thinking of you.' But usually there's no response," he says.
According to the Jehovah's Witnesses, the faith has more than 138,000 members in the UK, and more than eight million internationally.
Terri O'Sullivan left the religion 17 years ago, aged 21, and was kicked out of her home by her mother.
She now runs a support network for those who leave or are excluded from it.
She says she is yet to find a former Jehovah's Witness who has not experienced depression, alcoholism, suicidal feelings or self-harm.
She adds that while not everyone goes through a formal disfellowship when they leave, their relationships seldom go on unaffected.
"With some ex-Witnesses," she says, "some of their families will still talk to them - but it will always be strained."
Jehovah's Witnesses at a glance
Find out more from BBC Religion
Sarah says the loss of her closest family ties has been "very, very difficult" to cope with.
She is engaged, and aware she is "having to plan a wedding where your parents won't attend".
"I would class myself as an orphan, which is quite sad," she says.
Her support network comes from her friends at work. When she left the faith, she says, they "rallied around" her, in contrast to what she had expected.
"These people I'd been told [by the religion] were awful, were bad association, and God was going to smite them all at Armageddon.
"Yet these people opened up their homes."
Last memories
Sarah is still, however, complimentary about most of the people within her former faith.
"There are good people in the religion, who believe they are saving people's lives [by spreading the faith's message]," she says.
"I look back with some happy memories, because they were the last memories I have with my family and siblings.
"But then I do have to look back and feel a lot of heartbreak that I'm never going to be able to sit down with them for a Sunday meal again.
"When they die, I probably won't be invited to the funeral either."
Watch the Victoria Derbyshire programme on weekdays between 09:00 and 11:00 on BBC Two and the BBC News channel.
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Five Lancashire museums under the threat of closure could survive after the local council received "robust" business plans for their futures.
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Lancashire County Council will close the five as part of budget cuts and said in March they would shut at the end of September.
The council said they could now reopen in 2017 after four organisations submitted "encouraging" plans for them.
However, councillor Marcus Johnstone said there was "a lot of work to do".
The five affected museums include Burnley's Queen Street Mill, the Museum of Lancashire in Preston and Judges' Lodgings in Lancaster.
Funding was also cut for Rossendale's Helmshore Mills Textile Museum and Fleetwood's Maritime Museum.
The council has to make savings of £65m over the next two years.
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Many shops are closing their doors for four weeks, as England enters a second national lockdown. In June, when stores reopened after the spring national lockdown, we spoke to shoppers about the first thing they bought. Now we're back at the same shopping centre - centre.mk in Milton Keynes - to see what people are stocking up on this time.
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Christmas decorations
"As soon as I knew about lockdown, I went into work on Monday and said 'can I book off Wednesday because I need to go Christmas shopping'," says Joanne Nixey, 28, from Windsor. She messaged her friend, Chloe Gould, straight away and the pair have been stocking up on Christmas presents and decorations.
"I love funky Christmas decorations so I got a rubber duck and a fish," says Chloe. "It's random. A cushion, some candles. I'm trying to get it all done."
"It gets us out before lockdown," says Joanne, pointing to her Primark bags.
Chocolate and coffee
Sue Stone also booked some time off of work to get the bulk of her Christmas shopping done. "Boris knew we had a day off, so luckily he moved the lockdown to Thursday," she jokes.
"It's just the last day before lockdown so it's Christmas shopping," says Sue, 52, a company director. She and Lorraine Stonell spent £130 at Hotel Chocolat, as well as bagging perfumes, toiletries and a hoodie.
"I have bought my coffee pods," she adds, pointing to a Nespresso bag. "They are an essential, but the shop will still shut."
Sweaters and pants
"I got my work bonus so have come shopping," says Phil Read, 47, from Bletchley. "Considering the situation, I'm surprised I got a bonus. I work for the government so a very secure job thankfully."
In his shopping bags are clothes - "winter clothes, basically" - including sweaters, pants and some waterproof trousers to play football in.
He says the thought of lockdown "feels rubbish". "I have actually got a week off work," he says. "They are forcing us to use our holiday so I took this week off and have been doing all I can in these few days, cramming it in."
Stuffed reindeer
"Everything's half price," says Jenny Holloway, 40, referring to the Christmas pop-up shop, where she and her mother Helen McGill bought reindeer decorations for £10 each.
"We are just mother and daughter", adds Helen, "and we don't get to spend that much time together anyway because of work, and thinking about lockdown we won't be seeing each other. We are just trying to spend time together today before lockdown.
"It's a happy-sad feeling. Happy that we're out now, but sad for the people in shops. At 5pm the shutters are going to come down and when will they come up again? We were hearing whispers about furlough and I just thought it was really sad."
Matching PJs and sausage rolls
Elizabeth Morris, 38, and her mother, also called Elizabeth Morris, managed to do all of their Christmas shopping back in September and they are now "just getting some little bits".
"We have got some matching pyjamas, to wear for a whole month," jokes Elizabeth, holding up the bedwear for her and one-year-old son George. "It's that last opportunity to go to the shops. It's our last hurrah. Last day before we're grounded again."
On the prospect of another lockdown, Elizabeth, 58, says: "We are positive about it all now. We look forward to reinstating our walks." Her daughter adds: "It's my mum and dad's ruby wedding anniversary in November and we were going to Tenerife but can't now. We are now finding other things to do to celebrate. We'll find something."
Birthday gifts
"There's a couple of celebrations in our house at the weekend," says childminder Rose Iroegbu, 47. "My son is 18 on Friday.
"I plan to cook his best delicacy, rice and stew." She's bought balloons and some surprise gifts for him (she can't tell us what they are to risk spoiling the surprise) as well as a phone charging cable for herself.
"I feel a mixture of emotions" about a second lockdown, she says. "Worry and anxiety about the future."
Slippers, socks and toys
"I have done most of my shopping for Christmas," says electrician Chris Locke, 41, from Luton.
"I have bought some stuff this morning and put that in my car. I can't carry everything. I'll be finished today, kids as well."
Chris has bought some socks and slippers for his mother-in-law, plus some toys for his children, including Mario Kart Live and some Lego. "I'm fairly organised, like I always get stuff done before December. But more in advance this year."
Wrapping paper and standing Santas
"They don't send it out online," says Sarah Bennett, talking about the six rolls of wrapping paper she's just bought from Card Factory, which had a fast-moving queue outside. "With two kids you need a lot of Christmas paper."
"We are just getting bits," adds Sarah, who runs a cleaning business and has come shopping with her teenage daughter. "If I like it, I buy it. We got two standing Santas, reduced to £12.99 from the Christmas shop.
"We just came out for a mother and daughter day and we are going to TGI Fridays after."
All photographs by Richard Cave and reporting by Francesca Gillett.
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A lack of clear information is making it difficult for disabled people to travel independently, with 40% of the country's 2,560 train stations inaccessible for some people, according to analysis by the charity Leonard Cheshire. Here, Team GB Para athlete and freelance reporter Chloe Ball-Hopkins describes her experiences using a wheelchair on Britain's railways.
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When I saw that 40% of disabled people struggle at train stations because of a lack of steps, my first thought was that my experiences have been OK.
I catch the train from Bristol Parkway to London Paddington quite regularly now and other than one train not having an accessible toilet on it, I have never had a problem with the stations either end.
But then I thought a little more, and that isn't all true.
I thought about the route I take to Manchester Piccadilly, and how the Cheltenham station I use to get there had a really steep ramp down to the platforms.
In a manual wheelchair that's great fun to go down - but you can't get back up again when you return. Dilemma!
It means if you wheel your own chair you're reliant on help. People are normally happy to give you a hand, but that isn't really the point is it?
Although I say my regular Bristol to London journey is manageable, when I arrive at Paddington I don't head to the underground like most people do - I head outside to the taxi rank.
When I was in London for some of the events at the Paralympics in 2012, using the tube was the easiest way to get from A to B.
I was so lucky to be with people who helped me use the escalators - how naughty.
But that was the only way we were going to be able to do all the things we wanted without having to pay a lot of money for taxis everywhere.
Lots of stations just don't have step-free access.
I think that's the point...
Just because people like myself can't use steps and some stations don't have alternative options, it means we end up paying a lot of money just to be able to get about like everyone else does.
Many people with disabilities may not be able to drive, have a vehicle suitable for them, or be able to drive long distances even if they do have a car.
Using the train is supposed to be an easy and relaxed way to get about but instead it ends up being frustrating and deflating.
I know some stations that are older buildings struggle with putting things like ramps and lifts in place, but that doesn't give them an excuse not to try and find a way to cater for everyone.
Whether that's someone like myself who can't use the ramp they have put in place because it's too steep, or a blind person who has to try and manage flights of steps that they cant see.
The staff at the stations can be the friendliest people going but it doesn't resolve the situation if someone in a wheelchair is sat at the top or bottom of the steps with a train to catch in a matter of minutes.
Commuting on a train should be an easy way to get about your day - and that should apply to people like me too.
Newsbeat has contacted National Rail for comment.
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How much more obscure can a war get?
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Andrew HardingAfrica correspondent@BBCAndrewHon Twitter
Deep in the Sahara desert, in the vast emptiness of northern Mali, several hundred rebel fighters have overrun, and outmanoeuvred a small number of army garrisons.
So what, you might ask?
So a lot.
The humanitarian impact of the conflict is already being felt not just in Mali, but in neighbouring Mauritania, Burkina Faso, Algeria and Niger, as tens of thousands of civilians - many are nomads, but that's beside the point - flee the fast spreading insecurity that has erupted close to Mali's borders.
The refugees are putting extra pressure on communities already struggling with high malnutrition rates and the likelihood of a devastating "hunger season" in the coming months.
As for the Tuareg rebellion itself - it has evolved into more than a purely local quarrel.
Its latest eruption is a direct consequence of last year's events in Libya. Some Tuareg tribesmen fought alongside Muammar Gaddafi's troops. Others may have fought with the opposition.
They have since returned home, armed to the teeth with looted weapons, and seemingly determined to transform a half-hearted rebel movement into a serious - if probably unrealistic - drive for an independent Tuareg state, which they call Azawad.
The rebels are a coalition of different factions and agendas united under a new name - the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA). In a complex environment, the catalytic factor appears to be the arrival of so much new weaponry from Libya.
"Why do we need to fight for independence? We already own the desert," a Tuareg friend of mine in Timbuktu grumbled down the phone this week.
It is not clear yet how much popular support the rebellion enjoys.
But the Sahara is not what it used to be. As the world has found quicker, cheaper ways to move goods around the continent, the Tuareg and their increasingly redundant camel trains have been left to survive on the dregs - gun-running, drug smuggling, and ferrying would-be immigrants north towards Europe.
And now even the tourist trade has been taken from them. Al-Qaeda's local affiliate (Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb; AQIM) has found that the desert makes a convenient place to hide and to raise money.
The extent and nature of AQIM's links to the MNLA is hotly disputed - some Tuareg groups appear to be close, financially if not ideologically, to the Islamist militants.
But al-Qaeda's presence and its growing appetite for kidnapping foreigners for ransom have left the region even more isolated.
AQIM's influence can now be seen in Algeria, Mauritania, Niger and Nigeria.
As for Mali itself, the rebellion is aggravating old tensions between northerners and southerners to potentially explosive levels.
The army's military failures against the MNLA rebels could also have serious political repercussions, not least on the upcoming presidential election, scheduled for next month.
President Amadou Toumani Toure insists he will still step down as planned, but analysts and diplomats are quietly starting to wonder whether the generals will allow him his dignified departure at such a precarious moment.
Foreign interest in Mali's future extends far beyond the crackdown on terrorism and smuggling in the Sahara, with rich gold, oil and uranium deposits at stake.
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Donald Trump's willingness to build better relations with Russia is threatening to turn US foreign policy on its head. His openness towards Vladimir Putin has dismayed most of the foreign policy establishment in Washington. But it's now shared by some European politicians, not all of them far-right extremists, in France, Italy, Hungary, the Czech Republic and elsewhere. They can't all be Kremlin agents - so what's the new pull of Putin for some in the West?
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By Tim WhewellBBC News
The two politicians, one American, one Russian, put down their drinks and clasped hands across the pub table. Then they both pushed. But there was no real contest.
The arm-wrestling match was over in a second and the winner was the deputy mayor of St Petersburg, a man who'd built up his strength through years of judo training. Few outside Russia had ever heard of him. But five years later he would become its president.
US Congressman Dana Rohrabacher still laughs when he recalls his brief duel with Vladimir Putin in 1995, when the Russian came over in an official delegation. He hasn't met Mr Putin since. But for many years he's been the most consistent voice for détente on Capitol Hill, often effectively in a minority of one.
"I don't see Putin as a good guy, I see him as a bad guy. But every bad guy in the world isn't our enemy that we have to find ways of thwarting and beating up," Congressman Rohrabacher says.
"There are a lot of areas where this would be a better world if we were working together, rather than this constant barrage of hostility aimed at anything the Russians are trying to do."
Mr Rohrabacher doesn't condone Russian hacking during the US election campaign or the Kremlin's military incursions into Ukraine. But he believes Russia is the victim of Western double standards.
And that view is shared by some Western experts on Russia, though the vast majority stress how aggressive the country has become under President Putin.
Richard Sakwa, Professor of Russian and European politics at the University of Kent, in the UK, is in the minority camp. "We are living in a huge echo chamber which only listens to itself," he says. "The key meme is 'Russian aggression' and it's repeated ad nauseam instead of thinking.
"When we have national interests, that's good. But when Russia tries to defend its interests, it's illegitimate, it's aggressive, and it's dangerous for the rest of the world."
Russia's 2014 takeover of Crimea and military support of separatists in eastern Ukraine is widely taken as evidence that Mr Putin seeks to extend his country's borders.
But Prof Sakwa sees the Ukrainian crisis as a symptom of the failure after the Cold War to establish a new international security system that would have included Russia.
Meanwhile Stephen Cohen, Professor Emeritus of Russian Studies at New York University, argues that the "vilification" of President Putin in the West stems originally from disappointment that the Russian leader turned his back on some of the Western-inspired reforms of his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin: reforms that many Russians blame for the lawlessness and falling living standards of that period.
"Putin is a European man trying to rule a country that is only partially European," Cohen says. "But we demand that the whole world be on our historical clock."
Prof Cohen is a rare liberal voice for detente. Most Americans who want better relations with Russia are on the political right.
Some are neo-isolationists who dislike what they see as their country's attempts to "export democracy", whether to Iraq, Syria or Russia. In that, they're at one with the Kremlin, which opposes any outside interference in the affairs of sovereign states.
Others are "strategic realists" who argue that great powers, including Russia, will always have "spheres of influence" beyond their borders.
America's Monroe Doctrine sought to prevent outside military and political involvement in the New World.
The opposite argument is that independent states have the right to belong to whatever alliances they like. Most former Soviet-bloc countries in Eastern Europe joined NATO and the EU after the Cold War.
And some present and former leaders of those states have warned Trump that any attempt to strike a grand bargain with Mr Putin would endanger the region's security.
But one central European government - Hungary's - takes a different view. "We don't see Russia as a threat to Hungary," its foreign minister Peter Szijjarto says. "If Russia and the US cannot work together on global issues, then that undermines security in Eastern Europe."
Hungary also wants to end the Western sanctions imposed on Russia following its annexation of Crimea. It says they've been counter-productive, leading to Russian counter-sanctions which have damaged European export industries.
Peter Toth, head of the Hungarian association of breeders of mangalica pigs - whose fat is much prized in Russia - says his members are among those now suffering.
But the Hungarian government, which has been widely criticised for curtailing some democratic checks and balance, also shares other interests with Russia. Prime Minister Viktor Orban has said Europe must keep its "Christian values" in the face of immigration from Muslim countries.
The Kremlin has also made much of the need to preserve national identity and Christian values in its rhetoric, leading nationalists in the West to see Moscow as an ally.
Many, particularly on the right, believe the threat from mass immigration, and terrorism, is now greater than that from Russia.
Congressman Rohrabacher says: "To say Russia is the enemy, when they too are threatened by radical Islamic terrorism, is exactly the wrong way to go."
Arguments like that, reinforced by President Trump, seem to be swaying some Americans. By the end of last year, more than a third of Republican voters viewed President Putin favourably, according to a YouGov poll, compared to only a tenth in 2014.
It found however that Democrats dislike Mr Putin more than ever. Prof Stephen Cohen believes Donald Trump will have great difficulty selling a new policy on Russia.
"If Trump says we need a detente with Putin for the sake of our national security," he explains, "it's going to be very hard to get people in the centre and the left to support it, because they'll be called apologists for Putin and Trump. It's a double whammy."
Tim Whewell's BBC Radio 4 programme, The Pull of Putin, is available to listen to via BBC iPlayer.
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The House of Fraser store in Exeter will remain open it has been confirmed, despite previous plans for it to close this month.
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In October 2018 signs appeared in the high street store's windows advertising a closing down sale.
A spokeswoman for House of Fraser said she was "able to confirm that we have reached an agreement with the landlord to stay in occupation."
It follows a number of store closures across the country.
Sports Direct bought the chain in August and boss Mike Ashley has said his firm faces "significant challenges" in turning it around.
Previously known as Colsons in the 1800s, the Exeter store has remained in the same location in High Street despite several re-buildings and re-brandings.
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A chain ferry service in Dorset will be out of action for the next four weeks with passengers forced to make a 25-mile detour.
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The Sandbanks to Studland crossing has been suspended while the ferry undergoes maintenance checks.
Drivers, foot passengers and cyclists will instead have to make the journey on land between Poole and Swanage.
The ferry company said it made sense to carry out the work in November as it is its quietest month of the year.
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It was a true story of a small act of resistance against the Nazis that was documented in a 1947 German-language novel. Sixty years later, the book Alone in Berlin was translated into English and became a surprise international bestseller.
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By Emma JonesEntertainment reporter
Now French director Vincent Perez has made an English-language film adaptation, starring Emma Thompson and Brendan Gleeson, which had its premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival.
Thompson and Gleeson play Otto and Elise Hampel, a working class couple from Berlin, who were guillotined by the Nazis in 1943 for leaving hand-written postcards around the city encouraging resistance against Hitler.
In the novel, author Hans Fallada calls them Otto and Anna Quangel, and it's the death of their son that motivates them to rebellion, but Thompson notes, "the story is based in fact".
"They were just ordinary people, there was nothing remarkable about them and their lives apart from the turbulent times they lived in. But they refused to go along with the policy of hatred and that in itself is no small thing.
"They wrote nearly 300 postcards, with the same kinds of messages of resistance towards the Nazis and, such was the climate of fear at the time, nearly all were turned in to the Gestapo. Yet, even though in the film we see them mocked for losing their lives for such a small act of defiance, 70 years later we're still talking about this couple. So they did win."
Thompson, who won an Oscar for her role in Howard's End in 1992, and another in 1995 for writing a film adaptation of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility, jokes that in the character of Anna, "yet again I'm playing another good woman in a frock," but adds that she believes "this film is important for Europe at the moment because it's about being brave and saying things that aren't popular.
"I've always been one for saying things that aren't common opinion in society - that protest is an important part of life. Riots are important too, I believe. This story has particular meaning because it reinforces the idea that you need to be courageous if you want to speak up. You will be pilloried. You have to be brave to raise your head above the parapet, particularly now, if you disagree with a certain popular viewpoint.
"Yet this couple find their real humanity in standing up against something inhuman, so much so that they are happy to pay the cost, to lose their lives. It was a beautiful thing to play."
Thompson adds that it was the recent death from cancer of her close friend, actor Alan Rickman, which reminded her it was possible "to die well".
Saying that she has spent time "with many people who have been dying, including Alan", Thompson adds she has come to the conclusion that "it's possible to die beautifully, as my friend Alan did. It inspired me so much. And these two people in this film die with so much integrity.
"Why don't we want to think about dying at all, never mind the manner in which we will do it? It's going to happen to all of us so I don't understand why we are so blind and deaf to it."
The film itself has received mixed reviews from the international press, the Guardian lamenting that though Thompson and Gleeson "give of their best in their respective roles, neither get to display the live-wire intelligence that, in different ways, is a trademark of both".
It's also received some criticism for being made in English, when it was filmed entirely in Berlin.
However, Thompson credits the film with helping "change my viewpoint about the Second World War, which I had researched for other roles in the past, but always from a British point of view. It didn't occur to me for a long time that many Germans felt the Nazis had invaded them too and were suffering just as much.
"What I have realised is that like in any period of history, including now, in many parts of the world, if you set the population of a country or a city to spy and inform on one another, you create a living hell. Without freedom of speech there is no freedom at all, and this couple, by exercising that right under the Nazis, managed to come alive - even in the face of death."
Alone in Berlin is yet to receive a UK release date.
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The government has agreed to pay up to £1.2m of the £5m cost of clearing the Dale Farm traveller site in Essex, the largest site in Europe.
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Basildon Council has gained permission to evict those living there illegally.
The pitches were developed without planning permission in the green belt. The council had a request for £3m help with the cost turned down earlier.
Police are still waiting to hear if they will receive a Home Office grant for their role in the eviction.
The council has said it worked for a peaceful solution to the illegal pitches for 10 years but it was now time for action.
A travellers' representative has said forced evictions would have a bad impact on children in the community.
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The phrase "following the science" has been ever present throughout the coronavirus pandemic.
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It is a term used by policy makers to justify their response, both in Wales and across the UK.
But as testing strategies and numbers have begun to differ between Wales and England, is it still right to say everybody is following the science?
And what is that science?
What are the differences between coronavirus testing in Wales and England?
Both nations have been working to increase the number of tests they are able to offer, but England has been more successful at doing this quickly.
The statistics appear to show that England has been able to pull ahead significantly from the other UK nations in the number of people it has been testing.
As of 18 May, around one person in every 34 had been tested across the UK as a whole, while it was more like one in every 63 in Wales.
The other big difference between Wales and England has been the criteria for being tested.
In Wales, the focus is still mainly on key workers, while in England tests are also being offered to over-65s who have symptoms, as well anyone traveling for work with symptoms, like a plumber.
However, there is a debate over whether simply testing more people is helpful.
Wales' Chief Medical Officer Dr Frank Atherton has previously suggested he did not believe in "testing for testing's sake." So, is there such a thing?
Sian Griffiths, emeritus professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, co-chaired the inquiry into the original SARS outbreak.
She said testing must have a purpose to be helpful. For the most part, she said that meant being able to follow up any test with a track and trace system.
"Until we have enough tests to break the transmission of disease, all you're doing is identifying cases," she said.
"That may help you, because you give the close family of that person clarity, but it doesn't help you because you haven't actually traced the disease, understood its epidemiology and the community."
Currently no UK nation is at the stage of being able to test, track and trace.
How do you choose who to test for Covid-19?
As outlined above, England has a wider criteria of people who can be tested, including anyone aged over 65 with symptoms.
This is where the phrase "following the science" comes in, although in reality science has several schools of thought on this.
Prof Karl Friston, from University College London, has been working on mathematical modelling for coronavirus and is part of Independent Sage, a group of UK scientists offering analysis independent to the UK government's official advisory group.
"There's absolutely no rationale for selective testing of people who are 65 and symptomatic," he said when asked into which scientific school of thought England's strategy fitted.
Part of the reason for this is because anyone over the age of 65 with symptoms would already be self-isolating and, therefore, could not pass the virus on, regardless of whether resources went in to testing them, he said.
"There are several reasons why you might be testing.
"If you're a doctor, or you're a care manager or you're a ward sister, and you need to know where to best care for this person. You need to know whether they're positive.
"If you are a chancellor and are worried about the economy, your agenda will be to get people back to work.
"You certainly don't want them sequestered in self-isolation unnecessarily. So you're going to want to test those people."
Prof Friston said a third school of thought would be to offer random screening tests to large numbers of people. That would help you gauge what proportion of the overall population may be infected at any one time.
This type of testing was carried out in England last week.
The perfect science, if you like, for driving virus numbers down would be a robust test, track and trace policy.
"If person X has symptoms they need a test and then they need to go into isolation," said Prof Griffiths.
"Their contacts need to be identified, traced and told to go into isolation/quarantine.
"If the test is positive, everyone stays in quarantine for two weeks and contacts should ideally be tested to see if they are infected. If the test is negative everyone can be reassured they don't have Covid."
Last week, the Welsh Government announced 1,000 staff would be needed to implement just such a test, track and trace policy.
What about testing in care homes?
The subject of testing in care homes has also proved to be divisive.
In England, all care home residents have been eligible to be tested since late April, while in Wales the criteria had until very recently been narrower, with eligible care homes needing to have already had a positive case, or have more than 50 residents.
Back at the end of April, First Minister Mark Drakeford said there would be "no value" in providing tests to all care home residents, but that stance appears to have changed following complaints that England was doing more.
At the weekend, Health Minister Vaughan Gething announced testing would be rolled out to all care home residents and staff in Wales. A move the Welsh Government said was inspired by "the latest scientific evidence".
It now means the last outstanding difference between the nations is England's target to have tested all of its care home residents and staff by early June, while Wales has said it aims to do the same "shortly."
But what do the experts make of testing all care home residents regardless of symptoms?
Prof Gabriel Scally, President of Epidemiology and Public Health section, Royal Society of Medicine, said it was far more important what the nations do with the information they get about infections in care homes.
"My concern is more that we have a full system in place to test and trace every case," he said.
"Without that, simply saying we're going to test everyone in a care home by June is tokenistic.
"It may tell you the extent of infection within care homes, but what you then do with that information is more important."
Why is Wales not testing for coronavirus like Hong Kong and South Korea?
South Korea has been seen as something of a bench mark in testing.
Its close proximity to China meant it was viewed as having the potential to be one of the worst-affected nations.
However, South Korea was quickly able to expand and roll out an aggressive test, track and trace system and has now recorded a fraction of the number of deaths and confirmed cases seen elsewhere.
So, why didn't we just do that here?
"I think we're being driven by the resources and availability of testing," said Prof Griffiths.
"What we'd like to do, and what we're able to do are not the same thing at the moment."
Prof Griffiths said experiencing the Sars outbreak in the early 2000s enabled East Asian countries to be far-better prepared.
"The whole of the UK was disadvantaged by the fact that we didn't have a testing industry.
"My experience is mainly in the far east, and you will have seen that, Hong Kong, Korea, Singapore China have done many more tests.
"The reason for that is that they have had the experience with Sars and they know that the way to get through this is to be able to identify cases, track their contacts, put them in isolation and break the chain of transmission.
"We didn't have the capacity to do that. We started, as we had a few cases we were able to do contact tracing effectively.
"But as the numbers grew we were then unable to do the community containment, which relies on testing, and the policy changed."
Is Wales losing out in the global coronavirus testing arms race?
The lack of existing testing resources in Wales and the rest of the UK has meant there has been a need to order in from overseas.
It is arguably one of the biggest problems in expanding testing, as ministers have eluded to.
Explaining the decision to abandon the Welsh Government's target to have 5,000 test a day by mid-April, the first minister explained: "We were relying on equipment coming to Wales from overseas. We were relying on some reagent chemicals coming to Wales from overseas.
"Those deliveries haven't arrived to the timescale we had hoped."
Prof Griffiths agreed competing in the global market for testing equipment was difficult.
"It would probably be a more sensible approach to work as the four nations of the UK together on the ability to get reagents and swabs," explained Prof Griffiths.
"Otherwise you've got little itty bits going in against much larger groups, such as the US. So working together is probably a more effective way of increasing the availability of reagents - and then the vaccine when it's ready."
Does it matter that Wales has the capacity to do more tests than it is actually doing?
This is again something with which all nations appear to have struggled. Each has a testing capacity for each day, but very rarely do the actual number of tests done come close to it.
Last week, Wales was doing around 1,200 tests per day despite having a capacity which rose from around 2,000 to around 5,000.
Arguably, this means each day there are people who could have been given reassurance about their symptoms who have not been. But the wider scientific picture is more complicated.
"It depends on how existing tests have been used and whether the capacity to contact trace is in place," explained Prof Griffiths.
"Numbers of cases are lower in Wales and therefore lower testing rates might be expected using current testing criteria.
"As the criteria changes with lockdown release you will expect higher numbers - but to do this you need to have enough tests and contact tracers."
In other words, what matters far more is your ability to apply an army of contact tracers to those tests being done, in order to track down and isolate anyone infected.
Do coronavirus testing targets make a difference?
One other key policy difference between Wales and England has been the emphasis on targets.
While UK government policy has featured a well-reported target of hitting 100,000 coronavirus tests per day, ministers in Wales have been more vague with time frames.
They previously refused to re-set targets after dropping plans for an equivalent 5,000 tests by mid-April.
"Targets are useful in general for getting health services working and doing what they ought to be doing," explained Prof Scally, who also sits on the independent Sage group.
"But it's not so much the tests, it's the people who are tested.
"I think a big concern should be the date of 12 March when the decision was made in Whitehall, followed by Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, to stop testing in the community.
"At that time, the chief medical officer of England said it was to pivot the testing towards hospitals. It was extended to hospital workers and key workers and then care homes.
"But what hasn't happened, is that there hasn't been a testing system set up in the community.
"So, I'm not so much concerned about the absolute number of tests performed, but where they're being performed and whether they're delivering the information we need."
Last week, the Welsh Government announced an ambition to up testing to 10,000 and then 20,000 tests per day over the coming weeks and months.
"I would have thought 20,000 should be able to do the job," said Prof Scally.
"Of course, it depends on the number of cases that are out there and multiplying. You won't know what that is to start so it's a kind of a chicken-and-egg situation.
"I would have thought, if you've got 20,000 tests available a day then that would be a really, really major contribution.
"That should be enough to make it work in Wales, if it's set up properly and locally, and well organised."
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The Olympics loomed large over the performing arts in 2012.
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By Tim MastersEntertainment and arts correspondent, BBC News
But while predictions of a "bloodbath" in London's theatreland proved to be wrong, away from London there were stark warnings from regional theatres about funding cuts.
Danny Boyle's Olympic opening ceremony turned out to be a theatrical event on a grand scale that would both bewitch and baffle its global audience.
Here's a month-by-month look back at some of the theatre stories that made the headlines in 2012.
JANUARY
The new year is ushered in with Andrew Lloyd Webber's prediction that the Olympics will cause "a bloodbath of a summer" for London theatres in 2012.
At the National Theatre, Katherine Kelly - formerly Coronation Street's mouthy Becky McDonald - adjusts to life away from the cobbles in Oliver Goldsmith's 18th Century comedy She Stoops To Conquer.
FEBRUARY
Almost a year after the film reigned supreme at the Oscars, The King's Speech finally makes it to the stage at the Yvonne Arnaud theatre in Guildford. Playwright David Seidler calls it "the fulfilment of a very long dream".
MARCH
The King's Speech opens in the West End's Wyndham's Theatre to strong reviews (see also May).
Stephen Sondheim's blood-splattered musical Sweeney Todd arrives in the West End from Chichester with Michael Ball as the demonic barber and Imelda Staunton as pie-making Mrs Lovett.
Handspring Puppet Company, best known for its work on War Horse, gives a first glimpse of its creations for a new show based on Ted Hughes's dark and mythical Crow poems.
APRIL
Matilda the Musical is top of the class at the Olivier Awards, scooping seven prizes. Its four child stars steal the show, jointly sharing the best actress in a musical prize. Songwriter Tim Minchin pays tribute to "the little twerps" as he collects the gong for best new musical.
One of the Matildas, 10-year-old Eleanor Worthington-Cox, becomes the youngest recipient of an Olivier in the award's 36-year history.
National Theatre Wales' The Radicalisation of Bradley Manning - about the US soldier accused of leaking classified documents to Wikileaks - is performed at his old school in Pembrokeshire.
At London's Apollo Theatre, David Suchet takes on the role of miserly, drunken former actor James Tyrone in a new production of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night.
The World Shakespeare Festival kicks off with the Globe to Globe festival - which sees 37 plays performed in 37 languages. First up is Troilus and Cressida in Maori. The Greek-language production of Pericles can be watched on The Space.
Former Conservative MP Ann Widdecombe makes a cameo appearance at London's Royal Opera House in a non-singing role in comic opera La Fille Du Regiment.
MAY
"That's the way to do it!" Mr Punch, the squawking red-nosed puppet, celebrates his 350th birthday with a big party in London's Covent Garden piazza.
David Hare's South Downs and Terence Rattigan's The Browning Version arrive in the West End after a sellout debut at the Chichester Festival Theatre in 2011. South Downs was part-inspired by Hare's own experiences as a boarder in the 1960s at Lancing College, in West Sussex.
Fred Astaire's daughter is in the audience for the West End opening of the musical Top Hat, based on the 1935 RKO film with Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Strictly Come Dancing winner Tom Chambers stars with Summer Strallen in the new stage production.
Playwright Laura Wade updates her 2010 sellout play Posh to reflect the changing political climate for its West End transfer.
Coronation Street stage musical Street of Dreams is postponed after opening in Manchester to mixed reviews.
Meanwhile, the The King's Speech closes less than two months after its West End transfer after the producers admit that the play had followed too quickly after the film.
JUNE
The London 2012 Festival launches - a 12-week "explosion of arts and creativity" that runs alongside the Olympics.
Its theatre highlights include a new all-black production of Julius Caesar at the RSC, set in post-independence Africa; Julie Walters in The Last of the Haussmans at the National; and the Festival of Chaos at Northampton's Royal and Derngate.
Audiences with eight hours to spare went to Gatz - a marathon word-for-word staging of The Great Gatsby in the West End.
Over at the Royal Court, Stephen Mangan got pregnant in Joe Penhall's blackly comic Birthday.
JULY
A feast for Ibsen fans: Hattie Morahan stars as Nora in A Doll's House at the Young Vic, while Emma Hamilton takes the title role of Hedda Gabler in Northampton. The lesser-known St John's Night has a UK premiere at London's Jermyn Street Theatre.
Actors' union Equity calls for "transparent monitoring" of casting in subsidised theatre to address the imbalance of roles for women and men.
Chichester Festival Theatre celebrates its 50th anniversary - it opened in 1962 under the leadership of its first artistic director Laurence Olivier.
Up to a billion people worldwide watch the London 2012 opening ceremony, a spectacular celebration of British social, cultural and industrial history. Danny Boyle's huge cast includes the Queen, James Bond, Mr Bean and hundreds of volunteer performers.
AUGUST
With the Olympics under way, Andrew Lloyd Webber admits he was wrong about a "bloodbath" for London theatre. Box office takings for the first seven days of the Games are actually up £250,000 on the previous week.
But ticket sales for the Edinburgh Fringe are down by about 1%. It is thought the Olympics are a major factor.
The first stage adaptation of Mark Haddon's best-selling novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time opens at the National Theatre with Luke Treadaway in the lead role.
The York Mystery plays, a theatrical tradition dating back to the 14th Century, are resurrected in an epic production involving 1,700 enthusiastic local people. Ferdinand Kingsley, son of Sir Ben, plays both God and Jesus. Satan is played by Graeme Hawley, best known as Coronation Street villain John Stape.
Tamsin Greig returns to the West End in the transfer of April de Angelis's Royal Court comedy Jumpy.
SEPTEMBER
Musical Chicago closes in London after nearly 15 years and taking more than £120m at the West End box office. Guest stars over the years have included Christie Brinkley, Brooke Shields, David Hasselhoff and Ugly Betty's America Ferrara.
Sheridan Smith admits her latest role as Hedda Gabler, at London's Old Vic theatre, pushed her way beyond her comfort zone.
Chekhov's Three Sisters gets a radical revamp at the Young Vic - in one scene, the cast bursts into a singalong of Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit.
OCTOBER
The Theatre Awards UK honour the cream of regional theatre with Theatre Royal Bath's production In The Next Room, Sarah Ruhl's story about sex, intimacy and equality, named best new play.
Sweeney Todd star Imelda Staunton wins the best musical performance prize, while Henry Goodman gets the award for best performance in a play for The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (also at Chichester).
Sir Nicholas Hytner says that regional theatres face a "clear and present danger" from funding cuts, while presenting the National Theatre's annual report.
At the National's Cottesloe Theatre, the audience for James Graham's Westminster play This House sits on replica Commons benches.
Over at the Royal Court, Jez Butterworth defends the decision to sell tickets for The River only on the day of the performance. Critics said the unusual move could encourage touting and exclude those outside London.
NOVEMBER
Danny Boyle and Sir Nicholas Hytner and the heads of regional theatres voice fears about venues at risk of closure from budget cuts.
One of London's longest-running musicals, Blood Brothers, closes after 24 years and 10,000 performances. Theatre critic Mark Shenton says it fell victim to the Olympic Games.
Sir Peter Hall apologises to Downton Abbey actress Laura Carmichael after he "unintentionally disrupted" her West End debut in Chekhov's Uncle Vanya at the Vaudeville Theatre. The 81-year-old, who could be heard speaking during Carmichael's final speech, said he had been "disorientated" after falling asleep.
Stephen Fry makes his official return to the West End stage as Malvolio in an all-male production of Twelfth Night, a transfer from Shakespeare's Globe alongside Richard III.
Meanwhile, Alan Bennett's new play People at the National Theatre sees the playwright take a provocative swipe at the National Trust.
Also at the National, Lucy Prebble follows up her 2009 hit Enron with The Effect - a new work about love and neuroscience starring former Doctor Who actress Billie Piper.
And at Stratford-upon-Avon, The Orphan of Zhao - "the Chinese Hamlet" - becomes the first Chinese play ever produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company.
At the end of the month, Danny Boyle's Olympic opening ceremony is honoured at the London Evening Standard Theatre Awards. Senior arts figures take the opportunity to speak out at the awards against government cuts, prompting a response a few days later from Culture Secretary Maria Miller.
Constellations, with Rafe Spall and Sally Hawkins as a couple whose relationship is explored in alternative universes, is named best new play.
DECEMBER
Critics hail a new all-female version of Julius Caesar set in a women's prison. Phyllida Lloyd's production at London's Donmar Warehouse stars Frances Barber as Caesar and Harriet Walter as Brutus.
Michael Grandage's new company launches a 15-month West End season of five plays with camp classic Privates on Parade, starring Simon Russell Beale (whose other must-see performance was in Timon of Athens at the National over the summer).
And musical Viva Forever! - featuring the hits of The Spice Girls - premieres in London. Written by Jennifer Saunders, it tells the story of a girl band who pursue stardom on a reality TV series. Reviewers aren't impressed: The Mail's Quentin Letts dubs it "a prize Christmas turkey".
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A missing teenager who cannot verbally communicate has been found, police said.
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The 18-year-old, who was last seen near his home in Hayes on Friday at about 14.30 BST, has autism and was believed to have travelled to Gatwick Airport overnight.
He was tracked down on Saturday afternoon.
Police thanked the public for their help in in finding the man who is believed to be unharmed.
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When her newborn son was placed in her arms for the first time, Lucy Lintott shed tears of joy. It was the most natural of reactions after what was, undeniably, a remarkable pregnancy.
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By Mary McCoolBBC Scotland news
The 25-year-old was diagnosed with motor neurone disease (MND) in 2014, making her the youngest person in Scotland with the terminal disease.
The illness cast doubt over the very possibility of Lucy bearing children - and so when baby L J arrived in February, she could not believe he was real.
"I had built it up so much in my head, I didn't think it was going to happen," said Lucy. "I was very emotional and I wouldn't let anyone take him off me."
MND gradually makes gripping, walking, talking and swallowing extremely difficult - and eventually impossible. It kills about a third of people within a year and more than half within two years.
Yet six years on from her diagnosis, Lucy, from Garmouth in Moray, says she is experiencing the "best feeling ever", taking care of her "strong, cheeky bundle" - who has a "great set of lungs".
Lucy says she has navigated early motherhood without much advice, given that MND usually affects people over the age of 40 and, as such, pregnancy among patients is incredibly rare.
She said: "I think there's only five or six cases in the world of people who have given birth while having MND.
"They didn't know how my body or lungs would deal with it so it was really up to me.
"But it went really well - the only thing I did was come off medication to give L J the best start in life."
Just weeks ago, Lucy and her fiancé Tommy were planning a May wedding, which has now been postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic.
As one of the 400 people in Scotland with MND, Lucy has been advised to stay at home for 12 weeks.
Normally she would go about her daily life with assistance from three carers - however, she has had to move back to her parents' home in order to protect her health and still receive the care she needs.
She said: "Because of isolation, I'm down to one carer and I can't really go out.
"The coronavirus has had a massive impact, I'd normally be out shopping, at the gym or seeing friends.
"I'll have to reorganise the wedding - and it's hard enough preparing one wedding then to have to change it all. So I'm quite gutted."
'It's crazy and surreal - but the best feeling ever'
In 2017, Lucy gave a stark account of how MND was like being "slowly paralysed" in the BBC documentary MND and the 22-year-old Me.
However, her strength, positivity and good humour were very much at the forefront of her story - she confessed most people knew her for her "weird-ass laugh".
Such qualities have now carried her through not just the upheaval of lockdown, not just illness and not just the challenges of parenthood - but all three at once.
She says that living with her parents has been a "godsend", and laughs as she admits the greatest challenge to her family - "probably dealing with me".
She said: "I'm really looking forward to introducing LJ to friends and do what we'd normally do over the summer, like going swimming or taking him to the park. Just the little things.
"I'm staying away from the coronavirus and my MND is stable and hasn't really changed.
"It's very crazy and surreal that I'm a parent - I'm responsible for a little bundle. But honestly, it's the best feeling ever."
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The request for delay is an answer to one question.
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Laura KuenssbergPolitical editor@bbclaurakon Twitter
When confronted with the possibility of taking the UK out of the EU without a formal deal in place or slamming on the brakes, which way would the prime minister jump?
Would she choose a pure plan - pursuing Brexit over the risk of instability?
Or would Theresa May heed the voices of warning, rather than those in her own party arguing that any short-term pain would be worth long-term gain, and ask for delay, despite the embarrassment of doing so, and the frustration of those who wanted her to keep the promise of leaving on time?
Mrs May kept many in Westminster guessing for a long time.
But her meetings in Europe, her plea on Tuesday, are evidence of the decision she finally took - that almost any entreaties to European leaders are worth it to avoid opening Pandora's Box. Pausing again brings embarrassment and angers many on her own side, but it's a lesser evil than departing with no deal.
If the prime minister is granted a strings-attached delay later, the next question is perhaps as big.
What will she do with the extra time she's been granted? Will it even be up to her?
Cross-party talks with the Labour Party are serious - both sides in the room are taking part in good faith and expect more negotiations on Thursday.
But the more talking they do, the more the scale of the task to bring them together reveals itself.
Forget a quick solution from this joint process, and don't bank on one happening at all.
The divisions may simply be too great - the moment when it might have worked perhaps has passed.
If that fails, then the answer may pass again, back to Parliament - MPs confronted again with the power to choose from a wide array of different choices - with the ability, if not yet the common purpose to choose a version of Brexit for all of us.
And of course, if a long delay is agreed it could push hungry Tories who want a change of leadership again into action.
But the obvious response to another question is crystal clear - who is in charge for today?
It's the EU leaders who will determine the date and nature of this delay - not the country that voted in an effort to pull back control.
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At least 38 migrants from Haiti have been found dead after their boat sank just off the eastern tip of Cuba, officials in Havana say.
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Another 87 people from the boat were rescued, Cuban TV reported quoting civil defence officials.
It said the boat was spotted only 100m off shore. A search for more possible survivors is now under way.
Fatal incidents involving migrants from Haiti - the Western hemisphere's poorest nation - are not uncommon.
In 2009, US Coast Guard officials called off their search for about 70 migrants from Haiti whose boat capsized off the Turks and Caicos Islands.
In May 2007, at least 61 Haitian migrants died when a boat carrying 150 people sank off the Turks and Caicos, a British territory.
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In February 2014 two divers died at a depth of more than 100m in a huge cave system in Norway. The authorities said it was too dangerous to retrieve their bodies, but four friends of the men decided to take the risk - and seven weeks later they descended into the dark and glacial waters.
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By William KremerBBC World Service
At the end of the Plurdalen valley in central Norway a 35m-wide river rises abruptly out of the ground.
If you dive into this strange pond, known as Plura, and swim underground for half a kilometre, you will emerge into a long, colourful cave.
Diving hobbyists can climb out of the water here to admire the grotto, before returning to Plura. But if you are highly trained and experienced - and an insatiably curious individual - you might continue on a course that quickly plunges much deeper, becoming narrow and difficult, through ice-cold, pitch-black water.
After negotiating this "sump" - an underground pocket of water - you will finally ascend to the cave of Steinugleflaget. And about 90m above the cave's vaulted ceiling lies your exit - a crack in the collapsed side of a hill.
On 6 February 2014, two divers cut a triangular hole in the ice at Plura, and, encased in waterproof dry suits and diving equipment, slipped into the water. Two hours later, after the sediment raised by the first divers had been allowed to settle, three of their friends followed behind.
The destination for all five men was Steinugleflaget. They were Finnish divers who knew one another from explorations they had made of the Ojamo mine, west of Helsinki. As was the custom of the group, no-one was in overall command, but the first diver to set off was Patrik Gronqvist, one of a trio of Finns who had discovered the passage between the caves the year before. He was diving with his good friend Jari Huotarinen, who was attempting the traverse for the first time.
The trip was at the extreme end of a dangerous sport. While most amateur divers might restrict themselves to dives of between 30 minutes and an hour, at a depth of 30m or so, the trip to Steinugleflaget would be a five-hour dive, with the aid of underwater scooters, to depths of more than 130m.
"The deeper part is very demanding, very cold water and narrow tunnels, and deep as well - it is the world's deepest sump that has been dived through," says Gronqvist.
At such depths and temperatures, a tear in a dry suit on the sharp cave floor could result in death.
There is also the possibility of equipment failure, and hypercapnia - carbon dioxide poisoning. "Carbon dioxide absorbs into the bloodstream much faster and easier at depth," says Gronqvist. Cave divers use "rebreathers" which artificially absorb the carbon dioxide they exhale, but these can become overloaded if the divers start breathing quickly, and at depth it is more difficult for them to control their breathing. "If you have to do anything physical - swim harder or faster or anything - that's very dangerous," says Gronqvist.
Hypercapnia can be deadly, but even a mild case may cause confusion and disorientation, which in a deep cave is liable to have serious consequences.
About an hour into the dive, shortly after the pair had swum through the deepest section and were about 110m lower than the cave entrance at Plura, Gronqvist realised that Huotarinen was not behind him. He went back and found his friend had become stuck in a narrow section of the cave, entangled in a cord connected to a piece of his equipment. He was using his torch to signal distress.
Huotarinen seemed to be starting to panic, which meant he risked breathing too fast. Gronqvist gave him a cylinder of gas to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in his system, but while Huotarinen was switching mouthpieces, he started helplessly swallowing water.
To Gronqvist's horror, his friend died in front of his eyes - but getting agitated would put Gronqvist himself at risk of hypercapnia. After a brief effort to free the body, he forced himself to calm down.
There was nothing for it but to continue to Steinugleflaget - very slowly. Divers who have spent time in deep water cannot go straight to the surface because of the risk of decompression sickness, another potentially fatal hazard. The deeper the dive, the longer the decompression. Because he had stopped to help his friend, spending about 20 minutes at a depth of 110m, Gronqvist knew he would have to spend hours making additional decompression stops before surfacing.
He also knew that at some point the second group of divers would find Huotarinen's body blocking their way.
The first diver in the second team was Vesa Rantanen.
"I got to that narrow place, where that first diver got stuck, and I had to decide what to do," he recalls. "My options were to try to pass that dead diver, or to turn around and try to do a very long dive back, go back to the deepest section and try to survive to the surface.
"I decided to go forward, and that was a very good decision for me. But it took me at least 15 minutes to get past that dead diver."
He eventually met up with Gronqvist, but Rantanen's struggle to pass Huotarinen's body had added three hours to his decompression time.
Because he began to run low on gas he was forced to surface 80 minutes early. Soon afterwards, he began to suffer mild pains in his knees and elbows. These symptoms of decompression sickness - often called "the bends" - grew steadily more serious over the following hours.
Rantanen later found out that while he had been struggling to pass Huotarinen's body, the diver behind him, Jari Uusimaki, was also running into difficulties. Norwegian police believe Uusimaki panicked after he reached the scene of the first accident. The fifth and final diver, Kai Kankanen, tried unsuccessfully to come to Uusimaki's aid. In interviews, Kankanen has said his memories of exactly what happened are sketchy (he was unavailable to contribute to this article).
But unlike Vesa Rantanen, Kankanen decided not to push through to Steinugleflaget. Instead he turned around and swam the long way back to the starting point.
He finally emerged from the cave in the early hours of the next day, more than 11 hours after setting off on a dive that was supposed to take five hours. By the time he reached Plura, he had to break a thin layer of ice to climb out of the water.
The three survivors were all hospitalised with decompression sickness. The Norwegian authorities took statements from them and closed the Plura cave.
In the cave-diving world, discovering how caves are linked together is a weighty achievement, one of the ultimate goals of the whole sport. When Gronqvist had made his original traverse of the Plura caves in 2013, he had done it with Kai Kankanen, and a third team member, Sami Paakkarinen.
Equipped with a dry sense of humour and a passing physical resemblance to Hollywood tough guy Vin Diesel, Paakkarinen had been diving longer than any of the others.
At the time of the accident he was teaching a diving course in Mexico.
"When you wake up and you see that there are 10 missed calls and 10 messages on the phone, you know immediately that something is wrong," he says.
Paakkarinen spoke to the three survivors on the phone from hospital, then spent the day walking around his hotel courtyard. He had trained both the victims and counted them as good friends. He felt unable to go in the water to teach, but he was unsure what he could usefully do.
Eventually he fielded a Skype call from the British cave diver Rick Stanton. World-renowned for his rescue and recovery work in caves, Stanton had a feeling he would be asked to travel to Plurdalen to retrieve the bodies - he had done a recovery there in 2006 - and had already started to find out what he could.
Sure enough, before long Stanton received a request for help from the Norwegian police, and two weeks later, he and two other British divers, John Volanthen and Jason Mallinson, clambered into Steinugleflaget.
But when they dived down to survey the site of Huotarinen's accident, they discovered that he could not be readily freed from the Steinugleflaget side, and he blocked access to the second victim, Uusimaki.
"It was evident that it was going to be quite a protracted affair, lots of dives, down deep and cold - and that was really beyond our remit," says Stanton.
The only alternative was to perform the traverse from Plura all over again, and thus gain access to the victims from the other side. Stanton says that he and his fellow divers considered it, and decided it was too risky.
So the Norwegian police called off the recovery.
At that point Gronqvist, a firefighter by trade, made Jari Huotarinen's wife a promise.
"I told the widow that we would go and get them," he recalls. "I told her that they are not going to be left there, that we would think of something."
Having the bodies would help the families grieve, and would also help to prevent lengthy delays to insurance and inheritance settlements.
He soon discovered his friends had all had the same idea. "Everyone was waiting for the SMS," he says.
All three survivors would be involved, plus Paakkarinen.
It's well known that some of the world's most challenging peaks are dotted with the remains of mountaineers whose bodies could not be safely retrieved. But Paakkarinen says that leaving bodies in the Norwegian cave would have been like leaving victims of a car crash by the side of the road.
"It's a code that no-one is left behind," he says. "You always have to do your best to get your friends out, wherever they are."
He and his friends also knew that there was a chance that part of northern Europe's biggest wet cave system would remain closed to the sport forever if they failed.
But the mission had to be planned in secret. If they asked the Norwegian police for permission, it was certain to be refused.
They had a distinct advantage over the British rescue team - they had performed the traverse before, so felt confident they could reach the bodies from the Plura side, cut Huotarinen's body free and guide both of them to the surface.
"I don't say that there was no risk to us," says Paakkarinen. "Quite the opposite, it is one of the most challenging dives that you can do, this Plura traverse. But then again, we have the best knowledge of the place, we are the original explorers of the place, we know the place like our own pockets."
But this advantage was offset by the fact that the men knew the victims they would be rescuing. How would they react when they came to the site of the accident, and had to handle their corpses? Would they become upset and breathe more quickly, or make a silly mistake that could lead to another tragedy?
For this reason, Paakkarinen says they tried to process "all the emotional stuff" in the month leading up to the rescue, so that when the time came they could focus on the task in hand, working almost like robots.
A new documentary, currently on release in Finland, depicts what happened.
In Diving into the Unknown, we do not see any of the divers collapsing into tears, or talking emotionally about lost friends. Instead, the atmosphere is one of intense single-mindedness, as the team discuss how to manoeuvre the bodies through the water, and preserve them until the police, notified after the fact, could come and collect them.
Find out more
In all, a team of 27 people descended on Plurdalen on 22 March 2014 - 17 Finns and 10 Norwegians. Two teams of support divers would work at shallower levels at both ends of the traverse, while Gronqvist, Paakkarinen and Kankanen would dive once again to the deepest section of the cave to raise the bodies up.
Vesa Rantanen, who was still recovering from a spinal injury caused by his decompression sickness, would be surface manager.
This time they took no chances. The first step in the five-day operation was to lug more than a tonne of gear into the cave at Steinugleflaget, winching it bit by bit up a cable to the mountain.
Then they spent a day setting up equipment, leaving 50 cylinders of gas along the route and, on the Plura side, an underwater habitat. This is a pocket of air that divers can use during decompression stops, allowing them to get out of the cold water, remove their masks and even eat. If the divers found Huotarinen's body impossible to shift, they would have to make the long trip back to Plura, and such a device might well be a life-saver.
On the third day, 24 March, the divers began the recovery itself, slipping once again beneath the icy lid of Plura, accompanied by underwater camera operators.
But after descending about 85m Kankanen returned.
Looking upset, he explains in the film that he slept badly and is simply not in the right frame of mind for the operation. Paakkarinen and Gronqvist continue the descent alone.
In gripping footage, the divers' torches catch the jagged edges of the cave walls. We hear the clanking of their gas cylinders and the intermittent whirring of underwater scooters. The men's breathing, the bubbles released from their equipment, and the occasional muffled command complete the soundtrack.
They pass the floating body of Jari Uusimaki. Then, just 20m or so further on they encounter Jari Huotarinen, exactly as Gronqvist had left him seven weeks earlier.
Cutting his equipment away, they manage to release the body and negotiate it through the narrow part of the cave. Then Gronqvist steers a dive scooter towards the surface, towing the body, while Paakkarinen follows to help manouevre it.
Gronqvist is the first to surface, eventually, in Steinugleflaget, where Vesa Rantanen is waiting to greet him.
"I've been thinking about this every single night since I walked out of here," Gronqvist says evenly.
"Last time I didn't know whether to come back up or stay down there," he adds, hinting at what Huotarinen's death has cost him.
"If we had done a practice run then, things would have been different. It was totally our own fault."
Cave divers the world over need to have remarkable self-command, but Diving into the Unknown can be seen as a study in a character trait beloved of Finns - sisu, grit in the face of adversity. The film's director, Juan Reina, laughingly agrees that there is little in his film to contradict the national reputation for cool-headed composure.
Finns also have a proud history of going to great lengths to retrieve the bodies of deceased friends. The phrase "kaveria ei jateta" - "never leave a friend behind" - was used by Finnish soldiers, who put themselves in grave danger to recover the bodies of fallen comrades during the Winter War against the USSR in 1939-1940.
The following day Gronqvist and Paakkarinen returned to retrieve Jari Uusimaki's body, assisted at depth by another diver, Jani Santala. This time the team launched their recovery from Steinugleflaget.
It proved a more difficult day than they anticipated. This body was more buoyant and unwieldy than the first, and Paakkarinen came close to disaster when a part of the cave collapsed on him.
At last, though, both victims were lifted up to Steinugleflaget, where they were placed in body bags Gronqvist had taken from his fire station. The whole operation had taken 101 hours of diving time.
The group held a moment's silence in the beautiful cave.
The following afternoon they went to the local police station. Paakkarinen says that he sensed the Norwegian police were pleased that they had recovered the bodies, but "they let us know that we had broken some rules and they had to investigate that".
It was another six months before the group was told that they would face no charges for their illegal dive. The Finnish president awarded Gronqvist the First Class Medal of the White Rose of Finland, after he was nominated by his colleagues in the fire service.
For Rick Stanton, the British diver from the first, aborted, recovery mission, the Finns' effort was well-planned and executed, if "a little bit out-there in terms of danger".
But he remains troubled by the events in the Plurdalen valley.
"This incident happened, and then they've made a film and they all come out as heroes," he says. "But these two people should never have died in the first place."
He says that while people who have never been cave diving might think it's so dangerous that a few people will inevitably die, with proper training and planning, accidents such as this should never happen to experienced divers.
Despite everything, Gronqvist, Rantanen, Kankanen and Paakkarinen continue to enjoy the sport.
"Why do these guys who have families and everything, why do they go to these harsh places?" asks Juan Reina.
"It's not that they are just enjoying the thrill of risking their lives - there's more to it than that. It's their calling.
"It is very easy to judge them if you have never explored that world, if you've never been on the journey with them. That's why I wanted to take the viewers on that journey. Although there are two victims here, and a sad accident has happened - when you go through this journey with them, I hope people understand why they do this."
The Plura caves are now open once again. Nobody has made a new attempt at the traverse, but Sami Paakkarinen says for him it's only a matter of time.
"There are lots of questions - the original questions - about where the cave goes, and where the water comes from, and they are still there," he says. "And I am not afraid of the cave."
Listen to Vesa Rantanen and Sami Paakkarinen speaking to Outlook on the BBC World Service
Follow William Kremer on Twitter @williamkremer
Subscribe to the BBC News Magazine's email newsletter to get articles sent to your inbox.
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Nearly 200 passengers were stranded for two hours on Brighton's newest seafront attraction on Thursday evening.
A "slight technical hitch" was blamed for leaving the British Airways i360 pod stuck in mid-air. Here's how the story unfolded on social media.
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The i360, which only opened last month, promises to take passengers 450ft (137m) above the ground in a 360-degree pod.
It ground to a halt about 30ft (12m) off the ground at 17:00 BST.
On board were guests of four local businesses who had arranged an event to celebrate the tower's opening.
Financial advisor Tim Jones, one of the party organisers, tweeted: "I'm bloody on it and I can report we are trapped and I'm not chuffed!! #i360 #brighton".
Oliver McDonald, another financial adviser, was also not happy, tweeting: "Lovely 2 hours stuck 30ft up here this evening #i360 #britishairways #letdown".
Mr Jones said it "juddered to a halt and we were told by staff to move to one side of the pod to 'recalibrate the weight' - which made some people a bit nervous".
But all was not lost, as there was a free bar at the corporate event.
Managing director James Dempster reported that "free drinks were flowing freely!", while photographer Julia Claxton said: "Everyone just kept on partying like it was meant;-}".
British Airways stewardess Aimee Harman later told the BBC that free water and juice was offered to everyone on board.
She said guests were in "good spirits", and there was "a lot of networking and talking" while the pod was at a standstill.
Two fire engines were sent to the scene.
East Sussex Fire and Rescue said it was given assurances that specialist engineers following "pre-agreed procedures" were working on the problem.
While waiting to be rescued, those on board were able to enjoy the stunning sunset.
Shortly before the pod came back down to the ground, British Airways staff discovered there was a portable toilet on board, concealed under the floor.
It came complete with a pop-up tent to ensure privacy, but Aimee Harman said fortunately it was not needed.
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The war between Facebook and the Australian government is over.
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Rory Cellan-JonesTechnology correspondent@BBCRoryCJon Twitter
Australian news will return to the social media giant's platform, and it will reach deals to pay news groups for their stories.
So, who won this titanic battle and how will that play out around the world?
The former boss of Facebook in Australia is pretty clear.
"I'd say Facebook may have blinked a bit here," Stephen Scheeler told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.
"I think there's no question that global backlash against this was pretty stern.
"And I think Facebook probably observed that governments around the world were taking a harder line maybe than they had anticipated."
Microsoft's intervention
Australia had support not only from other governments, which wanted to see Mark Zuckerberg's company taken down a peg, but even from another tech firm that has previously been in regulators' sights itself.
Earlier this month, Microsoft came out in strong support of the new media law.
Its President Brad Smith wrote: "The legislation will redress the economic imbalance between technology and journalism by mandating negotiations between these tech gatekeepers and independent news organisations."
Cynics might point out it's not surprising Microsoft backed a law framed specifically to affect two of its biggest rivals.
After all, at a time when Google was threatening to leave Australia altogether, Microsoft was telling the Australian prime minister that its search engine Bing would be happy to fill the gap and contribute to the news industry.
But a spokesman for the company told me that its stance had always been based on principle.
For its part, Facebook says it's happy with the amendments to the law.
It believes they will put an end to the idea that the government should set the terms of a deal between private companies.
"It gives us the ability to strike commercial deals on terms that make sense which is what we wanted," says one insider.
With both Facebook and Google now striking deals with newspaper groups, the Australian government may not feel the need to go ahead with the legislation.
So should other governments take inspiration from what looks to have been a successful approach to forcing the tech giants to fund news?
'Screwed it up'
Not according to Benedict Evans. The tech consultant and former Silicon Valley venture capitalist has been a ferocious critic of the Australian law.
He says it was poorly framed with unrealistic elements, including the demand that Google give 14 days notice of any change in a search algorithm which is constantly tweaked.
"Google caved to extortion early," he says.
"Facebook stood on principle but screwed up by blocking everything instead of just actual news.
"Australia wrote a law that was physically impossible to comply with, and has now said: 'Oh well it's been a success because we're not applying it to anybody.'"
But he adds the principle of taxing tech companies to subsidise newspapers is set to spread.
"The challenge in this case is that you're sort of pretending it's not a tax and not a subsidy. You're pretending it's a commercial arrangement, which it isn't."
Radical action
The end result seems likely to be that Facebook and Google will strike more deals around the world to pay money for news.
The problem is that this will probably benefit the major newspaper businesses, including Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, rather than struggling regional titles. And it will do nothing to chip away at the dominance of Facebook and Google in online advertising.
So what's the answer?
According to ex-Facebook Australia boss Mr Scheeler, it's time for radical action: breaking up the tech giants.
"I've come around to the view that the scale, size and influence of these platforms, particularly on our minds, our brains, and all the things that we do as citizens, as consumers, are just so powerful that leaving them in the hands of a few, very closely controlled companies like Facebook is the recipe for disaster," he said.
While Facebook certainly lost the PR war in Australia, it has suffered very little damage to its bottom line.
But in flexing its muscles so unwisely, it may have made the breakup of Mr Zuckerberg's empire a little more likely.
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In 1969, at the height of the Cold War, a mechanic in the US Air Force stole a Hercules plane from his base in East Anglia and set off for the States. Just under two hours later, he disappeared suddenly over the English Channel. Did he simply crash or was he shot down?
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By Emma Jane KirbyBBC News
The evening of the 22 May 1969 had not been a good night for 23-year-old US Air Force mechanic Sgt Paul Meyer. Homesick for his wife and stepchildren, he'd asked a few days earlier to be returned from RAF Mildenhall in Suffolk, where he'd been posted, to the USAF base at Langley, Virginia. But his request for leave had been refused.
Bitterly disappointed, the young Vietnam veteran took himself off to a military colleague's house party, where he began drinking heavily and then, according to colleagues, to behave erratically and combatively. His friends persuaded him to go to bed, but Meyer escaped through a window.
Soon after, Suffolk police found him wandering the A11 road and arrested him for being drunk and disorderly. He was escorted back to his barracks and told to sleep it off. But Meyer had other ideas. Big ideas.
Breaking into the room of a Capt Upton, Meyer stole the key to his truck. Using the name "Capt Epstein", Meyer then called an aircraft dispatcher and demanded that aircraft 37789, a Hercules transporter C-130, be fuelled for a flight to the USA.
Find out more
The ground crew obediently followed their superior's orders and the bogus captain climbed aboard, released the brakes and taxied hurriedly from the hardstand towards runway 29. His engines roared.
Completely alone in the cockpit of the stolen 60-tonne, four-engine military transporter plane, an aircraft he was not qualified to fly, the 23-year-old serviceman steeled himself and thrust his throttles forward. Shortly before 05:10 on the dawn of the drizzly, overcast morning of 23 May, he was airborne.
It would have been just after midnight in Virginia, USA when Mary Ann "Jane" Meyer was woken by the telephone ringing.
"Hi honey!" chirped the excited voice of her young husband Paul after she picked up the receiver. "Guess what? I'm coming home!"
Rousing herself from deep sleep, Jane Meyer mumbled something congratulatory and asked him when exactly he and his crew would be returning.
"Now!" he replied triumphantly. "I got a bird in the sky and I'm coming home!"
Jane froze. "You?" she asked incredulously. "You are flying the plane? Oh my God!"
Nearly 50 years on, Mary Ann Jane Goodson, as she is now called, says that conversation, which lasted for more than an hour, still plays over and over in her head.
When she understood that Meyer had gone Awol and that he had stolen the Hercules, she begged him repeatedly to turn back, warning him he'd be severely punished by the military. She cannot remember the last words she said to her husband but she does remember his last words to her very clearly.
"Babe," said Meyer across the radio he'd patched through from the cockpit to the phone network. "I'll call you back in five. I got some trouble."
The line went dead. After an hour and forty-five minutes in flight, Meyer crashed into the English Channel.
A few days later, small pieces of wreckage of the Hercules, including a life raft washed up near the shores of the Channel Island of Alderney. The mechanic's body was never found.
"Why did he crash like that?" Jane asks quietly. "You know, The US Air Force never told me he'd crashed - no one told me he'd crashed - I just got a telegram to say the plane was lost… When he told me he was in trouble, I've surmised the trouble must have been jets that were sent up to take him down… I'm sure I've not been told the whole truth. "
In 1969, of course, the Cold War was at its height. The official US Air Force report into the accident mentions that an F-100 jet fighter was scrambled from RAF Lakenheath shortly after Meyer took off "in an effort to assist him", along with a C-130 from RAF Mildenhall. They were both apparently "unsuccessful in establishing visual or radio contact with him".
Yet Jane says that 20 minutes into her cockpit conversation with her husband, a man's voice came across the line and asked her to keep talking to her husband because they needed to find out where he was.
Hansard, the verbatim reports of proceedings of the House of Common and House of Lords, shows the then-MP for Bury St Edmunds, Eldon Griffiths, demanded to know why the enormous plane was not picked up by US or British radar "for some considerable time".
A robust reply is recorded by John Morris, the minister of defence for equipment, who assured the concerned MP that the Americans informed the Air Defence Operations Centre of RAF Strike Command within minutes of the unauthorised take-off. UK air traffic control had picked up the rogue aircraft on radar within three minutes of take-off, he told the Commons. Jane says her husband told her from the cockpit that he was deliberately flying low to avoid radar detection.
Henry Ayer was just seven when his stepfather was lost over the Channel but still becomes extremely emotional when he recalls the day the Army chaplain came to see his mother to tell her that her husband was lost. The couple had been married for just 55 days.
"I remember my mom just collapsed to the floor like a rag doll," Ayer chokes. "You know, Paul was just a good guy who gave us kids much-needed stability in our lives. He was really mature for his age - he took us hunting, walking the dog together, he sat us round the table at family dinners. So to think our government may have had a hand in it (Paul's death) - well, it's troubling."
The official US report into the accident describes Meyer rather differently - as a man "under considerable emotional distress" who was angry that he'd recently been passed over for promotion.
For the past 30 years, Ayer has battled to get more information from the American authorities. He claims that evidence he twice presented to a USAF attorney was lost and that the subsequent Freedom of Information requests he directed to the USAF were batted away to the CIA, which it said had operated the Hercules. His FOI requests to the CIA have simply been met with silence.
I remind Ayer gently that his stepfather was not qualified to fly the stolen Hercules and that a terrible accident could have ensued if Meyer had crashed onto a village, a school, or a hospital. Might Ayer understand, I ask, if the USAF had ordered the plane to be shot down at sea in the interests of "damage limitation"?
"Absolutely," says Ayer, who still regularly visits a memorial to his stepfather.
"We would be understanding of that. But we need to know conclusively. We need the government to be upfront."
Thousands of miles from Virginia, on a sullen, dank morning in Weymouth, Dorset, Grahame Knott, a seasoned dive charter boat operator, lowers camera and sonar equipment over the stern of his 13m boat.
For 30 years Knott has been diving and studying wrecks on the seabed with Deeper Dorset, a group of divers, and for the past 15 years, he has read everything he can on the story of Paul Meyer, which he admits has "completely sucked" him in.
Now, after a successful Kickstarter campaign to raise money for fuel costs, Knott is sailing his boat into the Channel to search for what's left of Aircraft 37789. So does he suspect Paul Meyer was shot down?
"There are enough conspiracy theories out there already without adding to them," he says, waving his hand dismissively.
"We just want to try to find the aircraft. Some people say, 'Well, what's the point? What's it going to tell you?' And the truth is, we don't know. But leaving it lost in the Channel isn't going to tell us anything, either. So the first thing to do is simply to look for the aircraft."
Knott takes me out to Weymouth Bay and hovers the boat over the site of an old World War Two wreck to show me how his sonar equipment can interpret the dark images of scarred seabed that appear on his screens.
To prepare for his search for Meyer's C-130 in the Channel, Knott has spent 10 years studying tidal movements, official records and examining reports from trawler and fishermen who've caught military hardware in their nets. Knott is now confident he has identified five hotspots within 10 sq miles where the remains of the Hercules may lie. Anything he does find, he's not allowed to remove or lift from the site but he can take extremely detailed images, which he could then show to an air accident investigator.
I tell him that during my conversation with Meyer's widow, Jane, she told me she hoped Knott might find her "sweet Paul's wedding ring or wallet."
He winces.
"That would be a miracle," he says apologetically. "I think the Hollywood idea of finding a fairly intact aircraft on the seabed with bullet holes in the tail - it really isn't like that. But I am confident we will find some wreckage, hopefully a propeller that will tell us something about the impact and what the plane was doing on impact."
In his west London atelier, aviation artist Simon Cattlin is putting the final touches to his oil painting of Meyer's Hercules, which has been commissioned by Deeper Dorset for the airman's family.
There's a terrible sense of foreboding in the scene, with the enormous khaki aircraft flying underneath a threatening black sky. From the cockpit, a tiny vulnerable, pink face is just visible.
"Can you imagine it?" he asks me. "Here was a guy who was a private pilot flying this massive military aircraft completely alone and in bad weather. When I was painting, I was wondering what was he thinking about in that cockpit as he flew over the Channel. He'd have had daylight working for him but not much else."
Cattlin is a private pilot himself and has researched in great detail the meteorological conditions of the morning that the plane went missing. The low cloud, rain and an approaching pressure front, says Cattlin, explain why Meyer didn't just head west immediately to set his course for the States but instead flew south to the Channel.
"If he'd gone immediately west he would have had the terrain hazards of the hills and mountains in Wales," Cattlin tells me, washing the dark paint from his brush in a jam jar of water. "Over the Channel he would have had clear visibility. As a pilot, I would have done the same myself."
Although Meyer was not qualified to fly the Hercules, he was extremely familiar with the plane as its chief mechanic. During our chat together, Jane told me that when flying with his crew, her husband would often be given a turn at the controls. He'd even call her on the radio, claims Jane, while he was flying.
But although Meyer was flying below the cloud level over the Channel, at some point he would have had to start the climb into thinner air for fuel efficiency if he was to make the 3,000-mile journey to Virginia. Could it be that as he climbed into a thick cloud deck, with a head still addled with drink and lack of sleep, that he simply lost control?
"Yes," confirms Cattlin. "With visual cues gone, he could have gone into an uncontrolled descent and hit the water and exploded."
He smiles and looks at his painting pensively for a few seconds.
"But he'd been flying for 90 minutes and there are no reports that he was flying out of control. He'd shown competency and shown he had a plan. I wouldn't say he'd done a good job - you can't say what he did (stealing an aircraft) is a good job - but I'd say he was credible as a pilot."
In their home in Virginia, Ayer and Jane reminisce about watching reports of the crash on the news and in the papers.
On both sides of the Atlantic at the time there was a public feeling of great unease that a drunk mechanic had been able to steal a military plane and fly it for over 90 minutes through British airspace. Incredibly, 11 years previously, another US mechanic had taken off in a B45 bomber from Alconbury base in Huntingdon, and had crashed his aircraft onto the London to Edinburgh train line.
In the May 1969 Hansard entry, the MP for Bury St Edmunds reminded the Commons of the 1958 theft and warned that as Meyer had skirted dangerously close to Heathrow, the British government must be provided with a transcript of the USAF inquiry hearings into the incident. The minister for defence retorted that it wasn't necessary.
The press was given few further details of the crash and the story was shut down. But over the past 49 years, fantastic rumours and wild conspiracy theories have sprung up in forums and internet chat rooms across the world.
Some say the plane had to be shot down because, as a CIA-operated aircraft, it would have contained secret documents - while others suggest Meyer survived the crash and went into hiding, perhaps somewhere in the Eastern Bloc.
As he prepares his small boat for its first official Channel search mission, Knott tells me he thinks the pervading fog of gossip and hearsay suits the USAF.
"I can't think of anything that prevents the truth from being told at this stage, nearly 50 years on," he says. "I just hope someone will pop up with more information and give the truth - who is it going to hurt now?"
For Jane and Ayer, Knott's Channel search is their last hope of getting what Jane terms as "some closure".
"He was having bad nightmares about Vietnam," she confides as we end our conversation. "We wrote to each other every day and we marked the days off a calendar. You know, he just wanted to come home. All he wanted was to come home."
Further reading
On 1 January 1985 a passenger jet crashed into a mountain in Bolivia killing all 29 people on board. No bodies were ever found. Nor were the black boxes that would have revealed the cause of the accident. But last year two young Americans decided to have a look themselves - and ended up achieving far more than official investigators.
The housemates who found a lost plane wreck
Join the conversation - find us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter.
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Russia is the bookies' favourite to win this year's Eurovision song contest, and one reason for this is that it has spared no expense to produce an expertly staged performance. Winning Eurovision seems to have become a national priority, but why?
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By Jo FidgenBBC News
Seven years ago, Swedish television executive Svante Stockselius was in Moscow, watching rehearsals for the Eurovision finals. It was the first and only time the contest had been held in Moscow, after Dima Bilan's victory with Believe at the 2008 contest in Belgrade.
"All of a sudden, the Russians they went crazy, and they said Mr Putin, our prime minister, has arrived," remembers Stockselius, who was then Eurovision's executive supervisor.
"It struck me how short he was, Mr Putin, but I also remember when shaking his hand it was a fist of iron, it was very, very strong, and he was also very curious about details."
But why would the Russian strongman himself take an interest in Eurovision?
"Because they said that the Eurovision Song Contest was an event of high importance for the country," Stockselius says.
"And also he wanted to make sure himself that this would be a show that would promote Russia, that would show Europe what we can do. And they put a lot of money into that show."
In 2013, the Kremlin's total seriousness about Eurovision was on display again.
As the votes came in, the singer representing Azerbaijan, Farid Mammadov, won a maximum 12 points from Russia. But when Azerbaijan came to vote for Russia's Dina Garipova, the result was a shocking "nul points".
"Ten points were stolen from us, well not from us but from our participant," Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov complained three days later, after meeting his Azeri counterpart.
"This does not makes one happy. We will agree on a unified course of action so this outrageous action will not remain without an answer."
What especially rankled with the minister was the fact that Russia had actually come second in Azerbaijan's popular vote.
It's not uncommon for national juries to take a different view of a song than the members of the public, or to be influenced by political considerations, according to Daniel Gould, a British teacher who gave up his job to bet professionally on Eurovision. These are the kinds of things he has to weigh up when trying to predict a winner.
Find out more
Listen to the Swedish Ambassador's Guide to Eurovision, presented by Nicola Clase, Sweden's ambassador to the UK, on the BBC World Service. Click here for transmission times or to listen online:
But politically inspired booing is not normal at Eurovision, or at least it was not until the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014.
That year the studio audience in Copenhagen, where the contest was being staged, showed its disapproval when the Tolmachevy Sisters walked on to sing.
"They booed out two 17-year-old girls," says Jon Ola Sand, a Norwegian TV executive who was in charge of the show.
"I met them backstage, they were absolutely devastated. It's the worst thing I've seen. It was so mean to these young girls who had done nothing wrong."
So last year he made a special plea before the singing began.
"We talked to the audience. We said please, everyone is invited here to compete in a friendly battle. So please do not boo at the artists."
The audience ignored him. Russia got booed again. And it wasn't because the song was bad - it came second.
One of Vladimir Putin's declared ambitions in his 16 years as president and prime minister has been to restore the country's status in the world. The outcome of this has been seen on the battlefield and the sports field - including the most expensive Olympics ever (winter or summer) in Sochi in 2014. And it seems Russia is determined to chalk up a second win at Eurovision. It's a matter of pride, and after the last two years of booing, of hurt pride.
"They have hired every top Eurovision person in their particular field to work on the Russian entry - two composers, a Russian called Philip Kirkorov and a Greek called Dimitris Kontopoulos, who've both written many Eurovision songs before," says the Eurovision gambler Daniel Gould.
"They've got the vocal coach, a Cypriot called Alex Panayi, who has worked on numerous successful Eurovision entries. They've hired the best Swedish backing singers. So basically they've put everyone in place to try and win it this year."
The verdict of the BBC Eurovision Twitter account after Russian contestant Sergey Lazarev's successful semi-final performance on Tuesday was "Olympic staging" and "Everything but the kitchen sink".
Lazarev himself also drew an Olympic analogy, in an interview with the BBC's Steve Rosenberg.
"For Russia it's very serious and like the Olympic Games in music, really, really," he said. "Russian audiences love Eurovision. Every year ratings are very high."
Across Europe, there are differing levels of enthusiasm for Eurovision.
According to music producer Christer Bjorkman, a survey showed that Swedes rank their birthday as the most important day of the year, followed by Midsummer, and then Melodifestivalen - the contest to select Sweden's Eurovision entry. Christmas came fourth.
In the UK, on the other hand, Eurovision has come to be regarded as something of a joke, the commentary - by the late Terry Wogan until 2009, and afterwards by Graham Norton - heavy with irony and innuendo.
Russia, despite the moral outrage voiced by pundits on TV when Austrian drag queen Conchita Wurst won in 2014, definitely lies at the Swedish end of the scale.
Dr Karen Fricker of Brock University in Canada, who studies the politics of Eurovision, says the UK's aloof attitude towards the contest mirrors its ambivalent relationship with Europe as a whole.
So why, in her view, is Russia so keen to win?
"You could make an argument to say that while there is a lot of antagonism between Russia and the rest of the world, a platform in order to show that Russia can do Europe even better than Europe - even though it doesn't even care about Europe - is itself a very strong gesture of political and cultural power."
Listen to the Swedish Ambassador's Guide to Eurovision, presented by Nicola Clase, Sweden's ambassador to the UK, on the BBC World Service. Click here for transmission times or to listen online.
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Four buildings have been shortlisted for the Welsh Architecture Awards 2017.
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The Royal Society of Architects announced One Central Square in Cardiff, Rhyl High School in Denbighshire, and the Silver House in Gower, were in the running.
The Chickenshed, Monmouthshire, completes the shortlist.
All the buildings will be visited by a regional jury before the winner is announced at an award ceremony at Cardiff and Vale College on 30 May.
The winners will be in the running for the UK-wide 2017 Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) Stirling Prize for the best building of the year.
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As part of our CEO Secrets series, which invites entrepreneurs to share their advice, we are focusing on businesses that have launched during lockdown. Each week we will look at a different type of person. This week we speak to female entrepreneurs aged over 50.
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By Dougal ShawCEO Secrets producer, BBC News
“If you feel it, just do it,” is the advice of Feyi Raimi-Abraham.
“Don’t stop and wait to have all the ducks in a row for your business idea, because it will never happen.”
The south Londoner has started her first commercial venture at the age of 52.
It is called The Black Dementia Company and it stems from personal experience.
During lockdown she was put on furlough from her job as a community education co-ordinator with a national charity. She became a full-time carer for her mother, who has dementia.
People with dementia find it comforting to reminisce about the past using familiar objects.
But Feyi found it hard to find relevant ones for her mother, who grew up in Trinidad and Tobago.
Many dementia aids would include things like pictures of seaside towns in Devon in the 1950s, or milkmen doing their rounds in London.
But her mother wanted to talk about Hibiscus flowers and hummingbirds and listen to Calypso music.
Feyi felt there was a gap in the market for dementia care aids with cultural symbols aimed at people who grew up in Afro-Caribbean households.
Her online business involves conceiving, creating and selling these objects.
She has commissioned puzzle-makers and hired illustrators and printers to make colouring-in books - the shop goes live this month.
“I didn’t think I’d be starting a business at this stage of life, I should probably be thinking about retirement options,” says Feyi with a laugh.
But she thinks mature entrepreneurs have some advantages.
"It brings the ability to absorb 'nos' and knockbacks," she says.
“There’s still the emotional effect of rejection, but you put it in your pocket and move on.”
She also wondered whether it was "silly" to start a business in lockdown, when most people were simply trying to keep their jobs.
But there was one thought that kept driving her, she says.
"I know there are people like my mother who need the products."
“You are worth something - that’s my advice to older entrepreneurs like me,” says Paula Grady, 57, from Hampshire.
Paula has often been left feeling worthless in the job market, even before the Covid-19 outbreak.
For the majority of her career she worked as an account manager in IT sales, but this came to an abrupt halt last year.
Searching for work during lockdown was a thankless task. She eventually found a part-time, far lesser paid job in the care sector – only for that to close under the pressures of the coronavirus outbreak.
She has applied for more than 500 jobs during lockdown, but only secured three interviews.
In many cases she felt she was over-qualified.
“Recruiters told me off the record that I was the wrong sex and the wrong side of 50. So I decided to take matters into my own hands. If you can’t find a job, create one.”
Paula set up a scented candle business.
At the very start of her career she had trained in hospitality management, which included creating culinary dishes, something she’d always enjoyed.
The process of making candles, which involves following recipes, reminded her of this. So she turned her garage into a candle-making studio.
Her Osme Candles business has been active for just over a month and she has signed up a kitchen design company and a gift shop as clients, and entered negotiations with hamper suppliers. She is already able to draw a small wage.
She says she enjoys using her people skills. A man came to her house to deliver some fish recently – she struck up a conversation with him and he walked away with four candles bought as gifts for his family.
Paula, like Feyi, believes being an older entrepreneur brings benefits.
“I don’t understand why experience isn’t valued more,” she says.
“Companies need people who have been around the block and have encountered situations before. You have life experience and working examples to draw on – younger people don’t have that breadth.”
Her advice to older entrepreneurs is: “Don’t be put off taking the risk, use the skills you’ve learned over the years.”
And don’t be afraid of the technology. Setting up things like a website and online payments isn’t as hard as you think, she says.
Older entrepreneurs can be more willing to embrace risk than their younger counterparts, according to Kim Brookes.
Kim is 59, lives in Somerset, and is no stranger to entrepreneurialism – in fact her day job is advising graduates at a business incubator.
Ten years ago she set up a gift registry company, which allows people to create gift wishlists for occasions like birthdays and leaving dos.
She launched her latest venture in August. It’s a luxury, scented jewellery brand called Perfino. She sells gift boxes containing pendants and a supply of scented, blended oils.
She did a limited run of sets in the summer and sold 20 boxes, generating a turnover of nearly £2,000. She also secured funding from the Virgin Start-up scheme.
Young entrepreneurs lack confidence and this stops them taking risks, she says. A lot of her work with young people involves instilling that self-belief.
Older people have accumulated experience and that gives you the confidence to take risk, she says.
“Also you get to the point where you really don’t care about other people judging you,” she adds, laughing. “I will do Instagram videos and not care what people think.”
Age can also bring a sense of urgency to a new business, she reckons. “Perhaps it’s intimations of mortality - you need to get things done!”
"My mum died when she was 68 - I'm 59 - I don’t feel old, I feel energetic and I hope I have decades ahead of me, but the years can roll by.
"You say to yourself, 'If not now, when?'"
You can follow CEO Secrets series producer Dougal on Twitter: @dougalshawbbc
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With sales of more than 19 million singles and 10 million albums, One Direction are arguably the most famous boy band in the world. But, in a rare interview, Zayn Malik's mother Trisha reveals he nearly missed the audition that made him a superstar.
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By Shabnam MahmoodBBC Asian Network
"Whenever I took him out, as a toddler, little old ladies would say: 'Oh, he's cute, he's going to break a few hearts," says Trisha Malik, remembering the not-too-distant past when her son was more Bradford baby than boyband heartthrob.
It's the first time she has spoken to the media since Zayn, as one-fifth of One Direction, shot to fame on the seventh series of X Factor.
But things could have been very different, she says, if the 20-year-old had got his own way in the summer of 2010.
"On the morning of the audition Zayn didn't want to go," she recalls. "He chickened out, saying: 'Can't I just leave it?'"
Eventually, she coaxed him into going "just to see what happens".
"He hated dancing but loved singing," she recalls. "He used to sing until three o'clock in the morning and I often used to have to ask him to turn it down".
His "favourite song at the time was I Believe I Can Fly," by R&B singer R Kelly, she says - but he eventually chose the more contemporary Let Me Love You, by Mario, for his audition.
The teenager got a unanimous "yes" and proceeded to bootcamp, but he was still beset by nerves - and almost quit because he "felt like an idiot" during an early choreography session.
After a backstage pep talk from Simon Cowell, he was convinced to continue, and was eventually shepherded into a boy band with four other contestants.
One Direction may only have placed third in the contest (after Matt Cardle and Rebecca Ferguson) but they are the show's biggest success story, with three US number one albums, and a stadium tour booked for 2014.
And they still don't dance.
His mother is fiercely proud, but admits she has to watch much of Zayn's success from afar.
"He went to Australia recently and I didn't see him for almost three months," she says. "It's sad but the family had to check on the internet to see where he was".
However, she keeps her distance when it comes to social media, and gets annoyed with the many fake accounts that exist in her name.
"I don't have a Twitter account as I don't even understand it," she says.
"Me and Zayn's dad stopped looking at social media because he (Zayn's dad) used to get upset about what people had written.
"It's like a kick in the gut to read things that are, most of the time, not even true."
Born in Bradford
Trisha Malik was born in Bradford to a white British working class family.
Her parents ran a pub in the city, but her life changed when she met and married a British Pakistani, Yasser, and converted to Islam.
"I've always tried to learn as much as I can about my husband's religion and culture," she says.
"I made sure the children went to the mosque. Zayn has read the Koran three times."
Since One Direction hit the big time, "I don't get introduced as Trisha Malik but as Zayn's mum," she laughs.
Life hasn't changed much in the Malik household, though. "I still shop in my local supermarket and go to the discount store for a pair of shoes," she says.
Indeed, our interview takes place, at her request, in a cafe at her local Bradford shopping centre, rather than any starry showbiz locale.
However, the family - Zayn's parents, three sisters and the family dog - have made one upgrade, moving to a new house in the city. Zayn paid for it himself and, in the recent One Direction movie, Trisha is seen, overcome with emotion, as she is handed the keys.
"We never had enough money to buy our own house," she explains. "We always lived in rented accommodation, so Zayn knew how very important it was for me to have my own place".
Until recently, Trisha worked as a halal chef in the kitchen of a local primary school, making meals for Muslim children. On Zayn's advice she gave up her job.
"Zayn said 'you don't have to do this anymore'. Instead, he puts my wage into my bank".
Trisha is keen to ensure her family remain humble and remember their early years of growing up in the Victorian-era terraced houses of the Bradford's East Bowling district.
"None of the sisters will follow Zayn's footsteps into a music career," says Trisha, who describes her offspring as "shy". They don't get to see their brother often but, when they do, she says it's just like it used to be.
"He'll tease his sisters, he'll hug them and they might have an argument like brothers and sisters do," she says. "He spoils the younger one."
And the family is set to expand soon, after Zayn got engaged to Little Mix star and fellow X Factor alumnus, Perrie Edwards.
"Perrie is a lovely girl and I get on really well with her" says Trisha.
"They're thinking of the end of next year, although no date has yet been set yet".
They might get time to discuss plans this Christmas, when the Malik family travel to London from Bradford to celebrate with Zayn and Perrie.
"I will cook the dinner," says Trisha. "Perrie and her mother will be there and we'll open presents, play games and stuff our faces," she laughs.
And Trisha's hoping that, once Zayn and Perrie tie the knot, they'll set up home a bit closer to her.
"If they have children I wouldn't like to be so far away from them. I would really like to still be part of their lives".
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India's economy contracted by 23.9% in the three months to the end of June, making it the worst slump since 1996. A grinding lockdown brought on by the coronavirus pandemic has disrupted business and left millions out of jobs, reports the BBC's Nikhil Inamdar.
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For the last five months, since India imposed one of the world's strictest lockdowns, Aditi Limaye Kamat's restaurant business has been bleeding money.
Her four popular eateries occupy prime real estate space across Dadar, an expensive neighbourhood in Mumbai, the country's financial capital.
"Only deliveries are being permitted. And that's not helping very much. It amounts to merely 10 to 15% of our overall business in normal circumstances and doesn't even cover salary as well as running costs," Ms Kamat told the BBC.
She wants the government to permit in-restaurant dining at the earliest with strict social distancing guidelines like in other parts of the world. "If not, many of us will be out of business by January," she adds.
India's National Restaurant Association has predicted that 40% of the country's restaurants will not survive the pandemic.
A fine print of the April to June GDP data released by the government on Monday reflects the pain of people like Ms Kamat.
Hotels and trade saw the sharpest contraction at 47% during the lockdown period, only preceded by construction activity which halved.
Barring agriculture, which posted modest growth of 3.4%, everything from mining to manufacturing and electricity to services contracted at alarming levels during this period.
"The time has come to unlock all the restrictions imposed in the lockdown phase at the earliest," Milan Thakkar, who runs a company that manufactures wall putty and plaster, said. His company, Walplast, saw sales plunge by a third during the lockdown and expects no incremental growth this year.
Calls from desperate Indian business owners to open up the economy are getting louder, despite India's coronavirus tally of 3.6 million cases, with nearly 80,000 new ones being reported every day.
One of the most severe lockdowns in the world has done little to curb the spread of the virus in India. What it has done is flatten the wrong curve, Rajiv Bajaj, the managing director of Bajaj Auto, one of India's largest manufacturers of auto rickshaws, said a few months ago.
At -23.9%, India has become the fastest contracting large economy in the world, according to economist Vivek Kaul. And the likelihood is that this number will be further downward revised, given that the government's data collection was severely impaired during the lockdown.
"I suspect the revisions will be much larger," Pronab Sen, the former chief statistician of India, told the news site Bloomberg Quint.
All of this puts India firmly on the path to the deepest recession in its independent history. The country last contracted by -5.2% in 1979-80. The estimates for a contraction this year range between an optimistic -3% to a more realistic -10%.
The implications of this for India's capacity to lift large swathes of its population out of poverty and generate employment for the youth are significant.
McKinsey Global Institute estimates that India will need to create at least 90 million non-farm jobs by 2030, if it is to absorb all the young workers that enter its labour market.
For a country that's lived through a decade of jobless growth and seen 19 million formal economy jobs vanish after the lockdown, this will take some doing.
India will have to clock a growth rate of at least 8 to 8.5% in the post Covid-19 scenario to achieve this goal, according to McKinsey. The global consultancy gives the country 12 to 18 months to act on a range of crucial structural reforms in areas such as healthcare and banking, take immediate steps to make its labour markets more flexible, improve social safety nets and ease the climate for doing business.
A failure to embark on this path could mean a decade of hardship, signs of which are already visible.
In the more immediate term, the government will need to focus on reversing the collapse in domestic demand and private consumption - which determines 60% of GDP - through more aggressive fiscal and monetary response to get the economy back on track.
"If left unaddressed, a longer period of below-normal activity risks knock-on effects on the labour market and ultimately on the banking system," warns analyst Sonal Verma. She expects India's central bank to reduce interest rates by at least another half a percent, starting in December.
At under 1% of GDP, India's stimulus measures so far have been among the most stingy among the world's major economies.
The government has argued that it didn't see the point in pressing both the brake and the accelerator at the same time. But with a gradual unlocking of the restrictions, there are hints that a second stimulus package is being prepared.
Sanjeev Sanyal, principal economic adviser to the finance ministry, told local media recently that India was prepared to build infrastructure at an "unprecedented" scale as well as allow a several percentage points rise in its debt-to-GDP ratio to get back on the growth path.
But economists warn that with revenues plunging, tax receipts drying up and a fiscal deficit already expected to shoot up four percentage points above the expected levels, the leeway for India to spend its way out of the crisis remains limited at best.
And ultimately, a recovery in the economy will hinge on a recovery in the pandemic curve, which in India's case is yet to peak, according to some experts.
How expediently the Narendra Modi-led government gets that under control will play a significant role in determining India's economic fate.
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To gamers, the artwork on their favourite titles is as recognisable as the front of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band or Dark Side of the Moon is to music fans. But as digital downloads eat into physical sales, will it suffer the same fate as the album cover?
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By Simon ArmstrongBBC News
For many, the colourful images evoke another world - a reminder of countless hours spent escaping the hum-drum of everyday life.
But as the click of a button and near-instant download replaces a trek to the High Street, is the importance placed on sleeve artwork going by the wayside?
"Great cover art does touch people," says Jonathan Gordon, editor of gamesTM magazine and website. "It adds a lot to the character of the game and the best examples are being thought of more highly.
"Resistance 3 on the PS3 was a big, breakthrough moment. It was designed by Olly Moss, a famous graphic designer. You've also got Grand Theft Auto, which has a style of its own and the Final Fantasy series artwork by Yoshitaka Amano is iconic."
In a move towards greater interaction with fans, a number of titles now offer a choice of artwork.
The team behind BioShock Infinite made several alternative covers available for download, while others have had similarly novel ideas.
"Some games have reversible sleeves," Gordon explains. "With Mass Effect 3 you can play as a male or female character so the cover has the male on one side, but if you take it out and flip it over you get a cover with the female character."
The design and marketing process is being put under the spotlight at the Game On 2.0 exhibition at Newcastle's Centre For Life.
Billed as the world's biggest collection of playable computer games from the past 60 years, it also features concept art and packaging from titles such as Uncharted, Tomb Raider and Pokémon.
Among those taking part is Gateshead-based Atomhawk, which has designed covers for titles such as Little Big Planet 3, Wheelman and Dead Island, as well as concept art for box-office blockbusters Guardians of the Galaxy and Thor.
Founder Ron Ashtiani says the painstaking process of creating a cover can play a crucial role in a game's success.
"Box art is your shop-front for the game. If you don't get people to come inside then it doesn't work.
"I think the quality has increased massively. Back in the 80s and 90s you would have a company that would have a mate who was an illustrator and get them to do some artwork.
"Now it's a proper process-driven model of working."
Leon Hurley, executive news editor at the gamesradar+ website, believes the popularity of digital downloads will only eat further into the market share of physical sales.
"I have to say that I'm quite pro-digital. As long as I can see the film/read the book/hear the music, I've no great emotional attachment to any physical thing.
"I read almost exclusively on Kindle via my phone for example. Physical stuff's ubiquity was driven by necessity, not love. It was the only option.
"Digital's only going to become more convenient, more wide reaching and more accessible with cloud-based things, for example streaming. I've used Chrome and Google Docs for years because all my stuff is wherever I am. As long as I can log in I've got my content."
So what does that shift mean? After all, if a game does not need a box then surely you do not need box art.
"There'll still be art, just not on a box," Hurley adds. "Covers might not be a thing anymore, but there's still plenty of imagery and art for music. It's just not on a dust cover - it's on phone lock screens and PC desktops."
Walter Lorenz, studio marketing director of game developer Reflections, a Ubisoft studio based in Newcastle responsible for Assassin's Creed Syndicate, Watch_Dogs and Tom Clancy's The Division, agrees imagery will remain important even if it is not in the form of a traditional cover.
"Before the proliferation of gaming journalism and magazines, a lot of people would pick up a game based on the strength of the box art not really knowing whether it was good or whether the developer was experienced.
"The box either spoke to you or it didn't. That was one of the main selling points back in the 80s. That changed with TV advertising. Strong box art was not so important.
"With downloads it's very important again, it's the first image that greets you on [digital game store] Steam, it sets the conversation.
"If it doesn't draw you in, people will not watch your trailer."
And, he adds, it is still very much needed as part of the wider marketing of titles.
"When you first present a game you usually have box art - or key art as it is also called - as well as screenshots and a trailer.
"Campaigns usually last one or two years and you need one iconic image throughout. You always rely on that piece of art to evoke emotions in the target audience whether that's on banner ads, a website or elsewhere.
"Digital is more fractured than traditional media. You have bloggers, Twitter and Instagram, and Facebook Messenger is supposed to be a new channel for advertisers.
"Artwork can be used across a number of formats but no matter where it appears, it has to have a strong message."
So will it be 'game over' for box art any time soon?
Not according to Lorenz: "You can still find all the big launches in bricks and mortar stores. Digital exclusives are not yet the norm."
And gamesTM's Mr Gordon agrees.
"In much the same way as vinyl has had a revival, boxed copies of games will still hold a value for people who want to hold something in their hands.
"So long as there are players who like that, it will survive."
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It's taken 10 years, but professional diver Grahame Knott has finally found a US Air Force plane that crashed into the Channel in 1969. The wreck may help resolve a mystery: did the homesick mechanic who made off with the aircraft from his base in Suffolk lose control - or was he shot down?
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By Emma Jane KirbyBBC News
"It cost me a fortune in beer," says Grahame Knott, "and I had to filter out a lot of chuff."
A crucial part of his decade of research was spent in pubs along the south coast of England, looking for men who operated trawlers and scallop dredgers.
These boats scrape nets along the seabed and occasionally turn up curious pieces of metal - which is what Knott was buying beer to hear about.
By listening carefully, he could guess whether the objects were likely to have come from aircraft, and if so how old they were, though it was not always easy to know exactly where they had become snagged in the net.
The Channel is littered with wrecks from the two world wars and the fishermen often assumed, incorrectly, that these were what Knott was looking for. But eventually, with the information he acquired, he was able to narrow down his initial 100 sq mile search zone to five target areas in a 30 sq mile patch of sea.
The culmination of this investigative work in snugs and public bars came in March this year, when Knott set out into the Channel to search for the 37-tonne, four-engine Hercules plane that USAF mechanic Paul Meyer had taken off in, singlehandedly and without permission, in 1969.
With fellow members of his Deeper Dorset diving team, he would set out from Weymouth at 04:00 and return home 16 hours later, after a perilous day spent crossing busy shipping lanes in a 13m-long boat. Often they had to dodge enormous container ships as they zig-zagged to-and-fro in one of the search zones.
"We were looking 200m either side with our sonar equipment dragging behind us on a 250m cable, so we cut a 400m swathe," says Knott.
"But our biggest fear was missing a sign of the wreck."
A fully kitted-out recovery boat would have had an easier time of it, Knott acknowledges.
A boat like this would have dynamic positioning devices enabling it to automatically hold its position in strong tides - but it would cost millions to buy and about £30,000 per day to operate.
By contrast Knott's team had a "day vessel", not designed for long-trips, and equipment that cost about £60,000 in total. They crowdfunded to meet their petrol costs of £200 per outing.
On top of that, weather and tides were often unhelpful - in nine months they could only go out 21 times. And it was only on the very last planned search day of the year, in mid-November, that the team finally found something that looked promising.
There was no dramatic Eureka moment, Knott recalls, more of a slow realisation that they had made their longed-for discovery.
First, sonar readings told them they had found an object of interest. They then lowered a video camera to within 2m of it so they could take a look. This confirmed it was aluminium, because of the distinctive way the metal corrodes.
"Then we spotted a wheel sticking out the sand, then a section of wing with rivets, it just got bigger and bigger," says Knott.
This was it, the Hercules that had gone missing on 23 May 1969.
Knott then found himself thinking of the pilot, alone in the cockpit all those years ago.
"The seabed is a lonely place," he says.
In 1969, Sergeant Paul Meyer was a US Air Force mechanic based at RAF Mildenhall in Suffolk.
At 23 he was already a Vietnam veteran and he was deeply unhappy - homesick for his wife and stepchildren and struggling with alcohol. His request to return to a USAF base in Langley, Virginia, had been turned down.
On the fateful night of 22 May 1969 something snapped. He drank heavily at a party and was then arrested for being drunk and disorderly. He was escorted back to his barracks and told to sleep it off.
Instead, using the assumed name "Capt Epstein", Meyer managed to take charge of aircraft 37789, a Hercules transporter C-130.
Having worked as a mechanic on board, he knew the protocols to get access to it, and had some working knowledge of how to fly it.
Alone and still inebriated, he took off on a mission to see his wife. While flying westwards, he was able to speak to her on the phone, a call that was partly recorded.
Meanwhile, military jets were scrambled to track him.
An hour-and-a-half after take-off, radar contact with the plane was lost. A few days later its life raft washed up on the Channel Island of Alderney.
Nearly 50 years later, it remains unclear if he lost control of the plane due to poor weather and his lack of experience as a pilot, or if it was shot down to avert the risk of it crashing into a populated area.
Knott, who admits to having become obsessed with the story, hopes the wreck may finally provide an answer.
The Deeper Dorset diving team have found a few wrecks in the Channel over the years.
In the mid-90s they found the Aracan, a sailing ship from 1874 that had once outrun The Cutty Sark - "quite a sight," Knott recalls.
They were also the first sports divers to locate the wreck of the Miniota, a WW1-era vessel that sank with silver bullion deep in the middle of the Channel, though Knott says it soon became clear that professional salvage divers had been there first, without reporting their find.
Deeper Dorset are not treasure hunters themselves, Knott says.
"We're story hunters who dive wrecks to satisfy our curiosity."
Although Knott also runs a dive charter business, taking paying customers out to see wrecks, he says he won't do that with the Hercules.
"It's not like a typical boat wreck - it's more like a sacred site, especially since Meyer's family are still alive," he says.
Instead the plan is for the Deeper Dorset team to dive down to the wreck site in spring, when the underwater visibility in the Channel will have improved, and to video the wreck from all angles. This will enable a computerised, 3D-image of the crash site to be constructed, and studied by air accident investigators.
Find out more
Emma Jane Kirby worked with Grahame Knott this year on a series of reports for the PM programme on BBC Radio 4, and has written two stories:
The mystery of the homesick mechanic who stole a plane (April 2018)
Was the newlywed mechanic who stole a plane shot down? (July 2018)
What Knott has seen so far has already left him puzzling.
"There's a large section of the aircraft that I just can't believe would be as it is, intact, if the plane hit the water at 250 knots, its normal air speed - but I don't want to add more rumour or speculation," he says.
A Hercules plane of the type flown by Meyer can be successfully ditched in water so that it floats, says David Gleave, an independent aviation safety investigator who has followed Knott's progress closely.
It would then sink, but largely keep its shape.
Gleave is especially perplexed by one piece of information in the United States Air Force official accident report from 1969, which says: "The opinion of the investigating officer is that the aircraft impacted the water with such force, immediately followed by explosion and flash fire, that survival of the occupant is most improbable."
An explosion and flash fire are inconsistent with a plane hitting the water, whether the pilot lands it on water deliberately or it falls from the sky, says Gleave. But an explosion and fire would be consistent with a missile hitting the engine of the aeroplane.
The official accident report says that one US fighter plane from RAF Mildenhall was scrambled to catch up with the Hercules but failed to locate it and returned to base. However there's evidence that British and French aircraft also attempted to intercept Meyer - and the accident report makes no mention of them.
"There are many parts of the puzzle still missing," Gleave says.
Knott says that one of the things that has kept him going over the last 10 years is a feeling of personal affinity with Paul Meyer.
"I feel strongly that his story hasn't been told," he says.
"I don't think he was this drunk guy who couldn't fly. In fact I don't think he could have been that drunk to fly for as long as he managed to."
In Knott's eyes, Meyer was a man struggling with family problems and work pressure, suffering from what would be described today as post-traumatic stress disorder.
He was also something of a "Huckleberry Finn" character, who liked to do things his own way - as one military tutor described him.
His body has never been found, though a corpse seen floating near Jersey in July 1969, in what could have been flight gear, was not brought to land and allowed to drift away. Even if the body had remained with the wreckage, Knott thinks none of it would be left today.
Meyer's wife, Jane, now in her 80s, and his step-son, Henry Ayer, have both written to Knott since the discovery of the Hercules.
Ayer is delighted, Knott says, although "it's also bittersweet for him and tinged with sadness".
For the 50th anniversary of the crash, on 23 May, Knott plans to dive down and place a plaque on the wreckage.
He hopes it will be possible for Meyer's family to be there for the ceremony.
Additional reporting by Dougal Shaw
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On 1 January 1985 a passenger jet crashed into a mountain in Bolivia killing all 29 people on board. No bodies were ever found. Nor were the black boxes that would have revealed the cause of the accident. But in 2016 two young Americans decided to have a look themselves - and ended up achieving far more than official investigators.
The housemates who found a lost plane wreck
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Koko, the celebrated western lowland gorilla , died at the age of 46 this week. Many people paid tributes to her by praising her signing skills. She's famous for her signing skills, but all is not what it seems.
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Her death resonated with many people, with videos showing her communicating with her trainers being shared widely on social media.
In many obituaries, it was claimed that she "mastered" American Sign Language, using over 1,000 signs, but some experts said the headlines praising her sign language skills were rather inaccurate.
When she was about 12 months old, animal psychologist Francine "Penny" Patterson started to train her to use a version of American Sign Language. Her instructors said Koko used it to convey thoughts and feelings.
Ms Patterson and her researchers documented that the gorilla understood some 2,000 words of spoken English. The abilities of the gorilla apparently to understand spoken English were documented by Ms Patterson and her researchers.
However, sceptical linguists and scientists questioned Patterson's methods. They also debated how much of Koko's communication actually came from herself or how much we projected ourselves onto her.
When Koko's death was announced, many news organisations, including the BBC, wrote headlines such as "Koko: Gorilla who mastered sign language" and "Koko, famed gorilla that learned sign language".
Many social media users complimented her on her supposed language skills, but not all were convinced that she was actually using sign language. However, many people were impressed by her communication prowess.
University of Birmingham's Dr Adam Schembri said the headlines need "to be worded with care to avoid crating a misleading impression." He said Koko "did not learn sign language", but she mastered a number of modified American Sign Language signs, which is not the same as American Sign Language.
Marcus Perlman, a linguist, who studied Koko as part of his research into ape communication, weighed in.
Gerardo Ortega, a sign language researcher, said Koko never mastered sign language. He tweeted: "At most she ritualised the use of some signs about the here and now and used them only after trainer promoted her."
However, some sign language users see things differently, especially some people who said she inspired them to learn sign language.
Speaking to BBC News, Prof Graham Turner of Heriot Watt University, said: "Serious efforts to teach apes some signing began in the 1960s with researchers attempting to teach individual signs derived from American Sign Language (ASL). And the apes did learn to use some hand gestures in this way.
"But it is a distortion to imply that Koko or any ape has ever learned to use a natural signed language like a human being."
Prof Turner said: "These languages use the face, body and hands in an integrated way, exploiting their multidimensional, spatial medium through the layering of simultaneous and extremely precise visual elements. So communication in ASL or any such signed language entails acquiring command of a far more complex system of linguistic expression.
"That system must also permit the creation of new patterns and sequences - formed within the constraints of the system - for any context that may arise. With this kind of appreciation of sign language structure it is plain that 'signing' apes have never proven capable of displaying grammatical competence comparable to human fluency.
"Although the apes can use two or three signs in a sequence, close inspection of filmed data has repeatedly shown trainers prompting them, and then questionably interpreting separate responses as signed sentences."
Whether she used sign language or not, her command of gestures was extraordinary for a gorilla. She connected not only with some humans but also with animals, especially kittens.
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Circuses are already a dying art form in India, and the lockdown imposed to spread the curb of the coronavirus has left them barely hanging on for survival. The BBC's Chinki Sinha reports.
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It is the night of 16 April.
Biju Pushkaran, 50, is wearing his polka dot overalls, his face painted with white powder, his cheeks reddened with vermilion and lipstick. Ready, he walks into an empty tent in Airoli, a suburb of the western city of Mumbai.
Rambo Circus, which Biju is a part of, has not had a show since 6 March. But that night they were taking part in a live-streamed show in honour of World Circus Day.
"We will come in to your homes and make you laugh," he announced.
The entire crew performs their routines without an audience to cheer and clap. But while the show goes on, they know the reality is that the curtain may well fall on them for good.
The performers ran out of food and money soon after India went into lockdown on 24 March and had to appeal to the public to help.
In West Bengal state, Chandranath Banerjee, 61, has closed the doors on his Olympic Circus and told all 75 members of his troupe to go home, with the promise that he would call them if they "ever make it out of these dark times".
"They cried," he said. "We need people to come and see the shows. With isolation as the new norm, we had to stop."
But Jayaprakasan PV, 52, the manager of Great Bombay Circus, doesn't want to give up. Not yet.
In a town called Manargudi in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, his tents stay put.
"We don't know what will happen after lockdown is lifted. Coronavirus has made us wait in the wings for now," he said.
Almost two decades ago, India had 23 active circuses, grouped in a national federation, with almost 300 smaller circuses across the country. In 2013, the government banned the use of wild animals and children in performances, which led to many of them going bankrupt.
Now, there are less than 10 registered circuses across India and 25 small ones and 1,500 artists including acrobatic teams from the hilly north-eastern state of Manipur. And it has not been easy. With many of these troupes dependant on cash transactions, a government move to make high value currency notes illegal in 2016, hit them hard.
They have written an appeal to the Prime Minister for help, asking for a loan to help them sustain themselves under a Covid-19 vaccine is developed. They are awaiting a response.
And the situation is not very different around the globe: the world-famous Cirque du Soleil made headlines when it laid off 95% of its staff last month.
Zsuzsanna Mata, the executive director of the World Circus Federation (FMC), said over email that "the pandemic has changed the course of history. Without any income circuses are struggling to assure livelihood for their families, artists and animals."
The circus as we know it, may be gone forever.
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From series like Making a Murderer to podcasts like Serial - true crime seems to be everywhere these last few years.
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By Kelly-Leigh CooperBBC News, Wisconsin
I put my hands up and admit it - I'm an addict.
For reasons even I don't understand, crime documentaries have become my default way to unwind.
If I have friends over, I might make an embarrassed joke about my streaming suggestions - but the evidence suggests I'm not alone.
The genre's growth is inescapable. Almost every week there seems to be a new documentary released and not without controversy.
Some warn we risk glamorising notorious killers and erasing their victims with the coverage. Others have accused programme makers of being selective with evidence.
So, do victims and the communities directly affected, think our fascination with true crime is problematic?
The survivor
Kathy Kleiner was only 20 years old when she was attacked by Ted Bundy.
He beat her in bed with a piece of wood in the Chi Omega house at Florida State University in 1978.
Before entering her room, Bundy had murdered two of her sorority sisters as they slept.
Kathy was left with a shattered jaw and severe facial injuries. Her mouth had to be wired shut, forcing her to leave college.
Now 61, Kathy says she hadn't spoken about the experience much until US media recently tracked her down.
This year marks 30 years since Ted Bundy's execution. You can probably tell because the serial killer seems to be everywhere in 2019.
In February it was reported that Netflix had paid millions to secure US rights to a new movie starring heartthrob actor Zac Efron as Bundy.
The announcement came as the trailer caused uproar online, with some accusing it of sexualising the killer.
Netflix, who had also just released a series focusing on interviews with Bundy, even weighed in on social media.
Reflecting on what it was like to be continually reminded of Bundy in popular culture, Kathy says: "I did not ask to be put on the journey with him in his life - with his killing and his abuse."
But for her, knowledge has meant power.
"I read every book and saw everything I could read and see about him," she says, while acknowledging others may have coped differently.
Efron has adopted Bundy's curls and signature smile for the role - and bears an uncanny resemblance to the killer.
"When Hollywood makes a movie they want it to sell, they want people to see it," says Kathy, speaking from New Orleans, where she now lives.
"Bundy showed them what he wanted them to see - he was always in control… Zac Efron - he's playing a part - he's an actor. He's doing this the way he was, the way they perceived Bundy."
You can hear more on this story on the Beyond Today podcast on the BBC Sounds app or online on the podcast's website from 16:00 GMT on 1 April.
Kathy says she attempted to contact the studio when she heard about the production, but assumes the email was lost among general enquiries.
She admits that she can't imagine watching as a relative of one of the 30 women and girls he is known to have killed.
"To me they're the heroes during this, having to endure this publicity," she says.
She hopes the movie reflects the victims more than the trailer alludes.
"I don't know how far they dive into the victims," Kathy says. "So without seeing it and if they don't do the victims right - then maybe I'll be pissed."
The community
Wisconsin has the unenviable reputation of being home to some of America's most notorious ever crimes.
Manitowoc County sits on the state's eastern shore. It houses 80,000 residents but is famous around the world for just one - Steven Avery.
A Netflix series charting Avery's wrongful conviction on sexual assault charges and re-incarceration for murder became a sensation on its December 2015 debut.
Hundreds of thousands of people have since signed petitions demanding his and his nephew's acquittal. A second series has already been released and legal appeals are ongoing.
A hangover from an unusually cold winter means snow is deep on the ground in Manitowoc in early March.
Understandably, perhaps, local officials seem reluctant to speak to yet another journalist.
The international spotlight has brought uncomfortable attention to the county and its city namesake.
Now, tourists drive over to the Avery family's Salvage Yard to take selfies. A firefighter tells me the local police have been forced to moderate Facebook comments because of abuse. I'm told threats have forced other officials off social media altogether.
One Manitowoc resident determined not to stay silent is Jason Prigge.
As a businessman working around the country, he says the final straw came when a client introduced himself and asked: "Well, did he do it?" in reference to Avery.
Since then, he and his wife Tina have made it their mission to change the outside world's perspective of Manitowoc. They set up an online web series, The Coolest Coast, to showcase positive aspects of the community like local businesses.
Tina describes the Avery case as a "freak anomaly" and like others I spoke to, points out the Avery property is actually miles outside the city of Manitowoc.
"Reporters come in or somebody from Hollywood comes in to make a show and they get to leave without delving in and really learning who this community is or what it has to offer," Tina says. "To them it's just a name, it's just a story."
"Imagine if you have a bunch of TV crews park outside of your house and they look at your house and they judge you because of one cracked window," Jason says about the negative attention.
"They never talk to people that live in the house, but they just look at the house from the outside."
The couple are keen to show off the area and in the cold weather, much of the river is still frozen and has a sparkly glaze.
The city's skyline is dominated by industry and a historic courthouse I recognise from the show, but is otherwise full of quaint local businesses like coffee shops and boutiques. It's a postcard image I didn't expect.
They urge people like me not to judge the county and all of its residents from the documentary.
"The cameras and reporters leave but what they've left here is a stain which we're trying to scrub," Jason says of the lasting damage.
The business
Eighty miles south of Manitowoc is Milwaukee - a city known best for its beer and baseball.
But it is also a destination high on the list for America's biggest true crime fanatics.
The Cream City Cannibal tour takes visitors around Walker's Point - the area where serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer lured some of his victims from gay bars.
Its website boasts the tour is "so gruesome that it was banned from Groupon twice".
When it launched, local media covered a protest by victim's families. Critics said it was too soon because the crimes were still in living memory for many.
The tour leaves from Shakers - a bar in the centre of the old gay district. Once owned by the Capone family as a speakeasy and brothel, the location has a dark history of its own.
Current boss Robert Weiss bought it in the 1980s and runs a number of ghost tours from the venue. He says he got the idea for a Dahmer tour when people he met travelling made reference to the killer after he introduced himself as a Milwaukee-native.
Bob also knew the crime well because local police frequented the bar and Dahmer even visited himself.
"I served him drinks for five or six months as he periodically came in."
About 12 people take the tour on a Saturday night - the weather is freezing cold and it rains and snows throughout.
Those attending are mostly true crime super-fans, but also include a family and a couple celebrating their anniversary.
A guide talks through the serial killer's upbringing, alcoholism and journey towards violence.
Dahmer, who admitted killing 17 boys and men, is considered one of the most heinous criminals in US history.
His murders and cannibalism are described in grisly detail by our guide, who points out infamous locations along our walk.
The information is disturbing, but not worse than what you may hear on any Dahmer documentary.
Bob insists the tour has historical and educational value, but I notice his bar also sells T-shirts, which feels at odds with that.
"Of the thousands of shirts that we have sold with that likeness on, have we had anyone complain? We have not," Bob says.
He rejects the assertion they are incendiary, and insists they only started making them because of unprecedented customer demand.
"I think if you are talking about things that are in poor taste, there's any number of other things that would go above and behind what the shirt is," he says, pointing to people who buy morbid artefacts like Charles Manson's artwork.
He also says that he rejected other bad-taste merchandise options, like cannibal-themed food.
Those attending the tour disagree that it's in bad taste or comes too soon.
"I've always grown up knowing about it," says one tour-goer named Alex who is in his 20s. "I think it's just part of our history and rather than hide it and keep it in the background, I think it's important for people to know about it so they can try and avoid it in the future."
Another, Melissa from Illinois, had already been on the tour before.
"I don't think it's disrespectful to the families," she says. "I think it's more of a way of remembering the victims instead of them being forgotten."
She, like me, admits watching a lot of true crime. She believes the addictive nature of streaming services is behind the boom in their popularity.
The experts
Deborah Allen has seen a "huge jump" in audience interest over the last few years.
She is vice-president of programming at Jupiter Entertainment - one of the biggest producers of true crime television in the US.
The company started making murder shows back in 1998, despite initial hesitancy from TV channels.
"It used to be that the networks saw true crime shows as their dirty little secret," she says.
In the last decade a number of dedicated 24-hour crime channels have sprung up in the UK and US.
High-budget series may have gone mainstream but there is still a mass of other content made to fill these network schedules too.
The demand means Jupiter now makes about 200 hours of crime shows a year - fuelled by researchers who comb through news stories from around the country.
Deborah says they only cover cases that have been resolved in court, and thinks many viewers take comfort in seeing justice served.
She also says their company listens to victims' families if they object to a case being covered.
But the recent public distress from the mother of James Bulger about a film made about her son's murder shows the family's view does not always prevail.
It's a similar story behind other popular shows too.
The McCann family did not contribute to a new series about their daughter's disappearance and Theresa Halbach's family have never taken part in Making a Murderer.
The loved ones of 1999 murder victim Hae Min Lee said the attention from Serial "reopened old wounds" for their family. Despite this, HBO have adapted that case into a new documentary series - The Case Against Adnan Syed - which follows on from where the record-breaking podcast took off.
Serial, like many other popular true crime series, focuses on casting doubt on a conviction.
This format has an obvious draw for any audience - allowing them to play detective for themselves.
Some programme makers, including from HBO's The Jinx, have even uncovered new evidence that prosecutors say have helped with cases.
True crime's growing popularity means big business in other areas too. There's now young YouTube influencers covering stories and in the UK, a new glossy monthly crime magazine was recently announced.
In the US, thousands attend CrimeCon every year - an event where fans pay hundreds to see experts and presenters from their favourite series.
A reporter from the New York Post pointed out most of last year's attendees were female - and Bob in Milwaukee has found the same with his Dahmer tour. He describes his average customer as college-educated women aged 25-37.
So why is it that we are so intrigued - is it pure morbid curiosity?
British psychologist Emma Kenny, who regularly features in crime documentaries, agrees that we have a natural tendency to be voyeurs and be attracted to darker things.
This, of course, is nothing new and can be seen throughout human history.
She points to crime's prevalence in other forms of entertainment too - including the dramas we watch and the books we read.
Emma says that watching crime shows can trigger chemical reactions in our bodies while we watch, while also affirming our moral views about right and wrong.
She says an interest in the genre is nothing bad but warns people, including myself, about watching too much.
"I think that for anybody who's watching this kind of stuff you really need to know why you're watching it, I think. Because you don't want to desensitize yourself too much," she tells me.
"Life is best spent around good people doing good things, exposing yourself to the best things in the world that you can expose yourself to… we should never be desensitized to the horror."
All photographs copyright
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The prime minister has said that people who seek to justify terrorism should be ashamed of themselves, in response to a question about the shadow chancellor.
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David Cameron was responding to Commons question after the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn's appointment of John McDonnell.
DUP MP Nigel Dodds said Mr McDonnell had in the past said terrorists should be honoured for their bravery.
He asked the PM if he would join with members from all sides of the House of Commons in denouncing that sentiment.
In reply, Mr Cameron said that from the reaction to what he had said, Mr Dodds had spoken for many, many people in the House of Commons and for the overwhelming majority of people outside.
He told MPs that he had a simple view - that the terrorism Britain had faced was wrong and unjustifiable and that people who seek to justify it should be ashamed of themselves.
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Four people have been arrested in connection with a hit-and-run crash which left a man with life-changing injuries.
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The 19-year-old, who is now in a wheelchair, was sent flying through the air after being struck by a car in Normanton Road, Derby on 5 November.
A 29-year-old man, two men aged 20 and a 20-year-old woman have been arrested.
Earlier this week, police released "shocking" CCTV footage of the collision.
The four people, from Derby and Burton, remain in police custody and are due to be questioned, Derbyshire Constabulary said.
Police added they would still like to hear from anyone with information about the crash or the vehicle involved.
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Councillors in Aberdeen have voted for a 1.5% pay increase for thousands of staff, subject to the agreement of trade unions.
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More than 6,000 members of staff would benefit, with the increase to be met from savings of £1.6m.
If the move is rejected by unions the payments would be deferred until next April.
The Lib Dem/SNP administration's motion was carried by 24 votes to 11 at a meeting of the full council.
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Matt LeBlanc is to leave Top Gear after the next series.
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The Friends and Episodes star began presenting the BBC Two show alongside Chris Evans in 2016.
LeBlanc went on to front the show with Rory Reid and Chris Harris when Evans left after his first series.
LeBlanc said that despite Top Gear being "great fun", the "time commitment and extensive travel... takes me away from my family and friends more than I'm comfortable with."
From the archive:
He added: "It's unfortunate, but for these reasons I will not be continuing my involvement with the show. I will forever be a Top Gear fan and I wish the team continued success. Thanks for a great drive."
BBC Two controller Patrick Holland said: "I want to thank the fabulous Matt LeBlanc for being a brilliant co-host on Top Gear."
"Matt has thrown himself into the show with real passion, revealing his extraordinary car knowledge and a willingness to get down and dirty. We were always going to be borrowing him from his day job as one of the top comic actors in Hollywood so I wish him all the very best.
You may also like:
"The next series of Top Gear (Matt's last) promises to be something very special and we have great plans to welcome a new co-host to join the team for 2019 and beyond."
LeBlanc's last series will be his fourth.
When Evans left the show after just one series, he described LeBlanc as the "captain".
Critics and fans responded positively to LeBlanc's first series without Evans.
The news comes following the fifth and final series of BBC Two's Episodes, in which LeBlanc starred alongside Tamsin Greig and Stephen Mangan.
Attention will now turn to who could replace LeBlanc.
The last series of Top Gear was sold to more than 150 territories, so producers may be looking for someone with similar global appeal and star quality.
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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The SNP has won 64 seats in the Scottish Parliament election - one short of a majority but one more than it won in 2016.
Nicola Sturgeon hailed her party's fourth consecutive victory as a "historic and extraordinary" result .
We look at the picture across Scotland and the shape of the new Scottish Parliament.
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By Philip SimBBC Scotland political correspondent
A modern browser with JavaScript and a stable internet connection is required to view this interactive.
Scotland's electoral map gives you a pretty good idea of who has won the election - it is swathed in SNP yellow. But look closely and you can see why they fell just short of an outright majority.
The seats they failed to win are islands in regions otherwise dominated by the SNP, meaning it was all but impossible for them to win seats back from the regional list, in the swings and roundabouts of the Holyrood system.
Two of the constituencies they did gain, in Ayr and East Lothian, were in a region where they already had list seats, two of which were subsequently lost.
The small strongholds that other parties have scattered across Scotland ultimately proved decisive.
The fact the SNP did not win a majority will make a real difference to the next five years at Holyrood. A minority government needs support from other parties to pass budgets and all its major reforms.
If it had been a majority, we could have put every other manifesto in the bin and taken the SNP's manifesto to be the definitive guide to the term ahead.
The Scottish Greens in particular - who were the SNP's partner of choice last term - will be looking forward to potentially having some of their policy priorities passed in return for crucial votes.
It also means the SNP will not have a majority on any Holyrood committee, meaning their legislation will not necessarily sail through the parliament with ease.
The Scottish Conservatives retained their position in second place in a vindication of the party's strategy to target the "peach vote" - the colour of the regional list ballot paper
There were initially some nerves that they might have neglected the "lilac" constituency vote, but they ultimately held their key seats with the help of transfers from other pro-union parties.
Tactical voting may have had a huge impact overall - every seat seems to have become a race between the SNP and the party that was judged most likely to beat them locally.
Labour - the party which may have the most to do to come up with a convincing answer to the constitutional question - finds itself marooned in third place again.
The Lib Dems meanwhile have slumped to just four seats due to their failure to pick anything up from the regional lists.
They have a number of strongholds in different parts of Scotland, but these are so tightly focused that the party's constituency wins in those areas make it very hard for them to pick up list seats too.
In an election of continuity, there was one surprise result which was quite different from previous years - turnout.
Some 63% of the electorate came out to vote, a full ten percentage points above the average for previous Holyrood polls.
It is hard to say exactly why this happened, but a number of factors will likely have been at play.
The rise in postal vote registrations could be one, as could the expansion of the franchise to new groups including refugees.
And the pandemic may have ultimately boosted turnout, rather than held it down, as many had predicted.
People might have had more time to engage with activists or go out to vote due to lockdown.
Indeed lockdown itself may have encouraged some to vote, having been a very clear example of the powers that governments can exercise.
Holyrood's diverse representation had somewhat stalled in recent years - but that has all changed now.
The class of 2021 includes a record number of 58 female MSPs. The SNP now has 34 women, Labour have 10, the Conservatives have eight, the Scottish Greens have five and the Lib Dems have one female MSP.
It has chiefly been driven by the SNP's policy of having all-women shortlists for many seats where male MSPs were retiring - meaning a lot of older male MSPs have effectively been replaced by younger women.
Among those are the first women of colour elected to Holyrood, the SNP's Kaukab Stewart and Pam Gosal of the Scottish Tories.
Labour's Pam Duncan-Glancy became the first wheelchair user returned to Holyrood, in what may be the most diverse parliament to date.
A modern browser with JavaScript and a stable internet connection is required to view this interactive. More information about these elections
Who won in my area?
Enter your postcode, or the name of your English council or Scottish or Welsh constituency to find out. Eg 'W1A 1AA' or 'Westminster'
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Passengers were badly treated by rail companies during an ambitious timetable change earlier this year, a report by an industry regulator has found. The Office of Rail and Road said "no-one took charge" during the transition , which mainly affected Northern Trains in north-west England and Govia Thameslink (GTR) routes into London.
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It said track manager Network Rail, the two train operators and the Department for Transport "had all made mistakes". BBC News asked commuters for their reactions to the disruption and the report.
St Albans
Will Tucker, 33, commutes to and from London three or four times a week.
"The report today shows that Govia Thameslink and Network Rail weren't ready to implement the timetable change - but they went ahead ahead regardless," he said.
"The thousands of St Albans commuters who were delivered a terrible service have no faith in another timetable change which is due in December.
"From the very beginning - we haven't been listened to."
Brighton
Alex Dowd, 25, is a modelling agent who commutes from Brighton to London.
"I've been late numerous times, nearly everyday sometimes up to about an hour. I usually get into work for 9am but on one occasion I didn't get in until 11am, so it has been quite detrimental to my daily schedule.
"There was no announcement, there was no nothing, it was just you turn up on the day and absolutely nothing would be available, or delays without any sort of warning or anything.
"I just think it's ridiculous. I don't understand why nobody could have made it smoother, or given us an idea of how bad it actually was going to be, otherwise I would have taken action to get to work. For some people they ended up losing jobs over it."
Alex Fisher, a 23-year-old kitchen porter, commutes from London to Brighton.
"It's an everyday matter that's pretty much something that we have come to accept.
"It's often the case of Thameslink trains being delayed. Since the new timetable came out in May, there's often been delays or cancellations.
"I think they've got the idea of what they are trying to achieve for us, but there's quite a few flaws that need correcting."
Poulton le Fylde, Lancashire
Steve Malone, 53, from Poulton-le-Fylde, near Blackpool, was a victim of a succession of cancellations when he was commuting to Wolverhampton, where he works at the university.
He said his employer was understanding, but he had also experienced "disastrous" commutes to Manchester and the airport in particular.
When he was going on holiday his train was cancelled five minutes before it was due.
"The most galling for me is that the National Rail live train times app says the train is on time when I'm on the station platform - then it gets cancelled," he said.
"I have ended up driving to Preston, which defeats the object of 'letting the train take the strain'."
Windermere
Taxi driver John Marchant says trains at Windermere railway station had been "chaotic on and off for a couple of years now".
The stoppage on the Lakes Line over the summer had led to a marked reduction in his income.
"You don't know if one is going to turn up or not," he said.
"I think a lot of tourists decided they weren't coming to the area because there were no connections.
"They've either been coming in their own cars or not at all. Tourists coming from abroad usually come into Manchester or London airports and then come here by train, so they faced disruptions.
"There were last minute cancellations of trains".
Liz Chegwin, from Mountain Goat Tours, which also runs the Tourist Information Centre in the town, described the situation as "chaotic".
"We've had lots of customers coming in wanting to know information, and we're not sure what to tell them, where the trains are etc.
"Customers, especially internationals, coming up from London to the Lake District are worried about the timeframe. They might have a limited time here so they want to make the most of it."
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A Jet2 flight from Belfast to Ibiza was diverted to Toulouse on Friday evening due to "disruptive passengers".
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A spokesperson for the airline could not confirm how many people were involved in the incident that caused the flight to land in the French city.
However, a Toulouse-Blagnac Airport press officer confirmed that one passenger was removed from the flight.
Flight LS397 left Belfast International airport at around 15.30 BST.
It was due to land at Ibiza Airport at 19.35 local time.
The airport's arrivals board listed the flight as diverted on Friday evening.
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Ten people, all believed to be victims of slavery, have been rescued by police in Wiltshire since August after a specialist unit was set up.
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Seven were victims of domestic servitude, one of criminal exploitation, and two others were found to be working in a cannabis garden.
Wiltshire Police has arrested three people on suspicion of slavery offences but none have yet been charged.
Operation HEET was set up to increase awareness of human trafficking.
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Ironbridge Power Station will stop generating electricity next week.
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Operator E-On said it has 50 hours of its licensed operating hours left, which will end in the middle of next week.
The station, in Shropshire, had to close by the end of the year or after a set number of operating hours under EU environmental regulations.
E-On said no decision had yet been reached about the future of the station's well-known cooling towers.
The station, originally coal-fired, was converted to burn wood pellets in 2013 ahead of its planned closure this year.
It can generate enough electricity to power the equivalent of up to 750,000 homes.
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On average, a prisoner walks out of prisons in England and Wales without permission once every 43 hours. But why do they take the risk, when most will end up serving longer inside once caught?
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By Emma Hallett & Caroline LowbridgeBBC News
"It is kind of like you have won the lottery, you've escaped, you've turned the tables on them and you have a massive amount of freedom."
Former bank robber and south Londoner Noel "Razor" Smith has served time in 33 different prisons, escaping from category C prison The Verne in 1992 and making several attempts to escape from a category A prison.
Walking out of The Verne in Dorset, Smith said there was a feeling of excitement in the knowledge he was "living on borrowed time".
Jailed for life for armed robbery, he escaped for 79 days, during which he committed a further 15 bank robberies.
He was sentenced to 15 years for the robberies and two years, to run concurrently, for escaping.
"Human beings are not made to be locked up - it's not part of our nature," he said.
"If you are in prison all you dream about is getting out of prison. Nobody wants to be in prison. It's not a holiday camp.
"If you escape prison... you can do whatever you like because you know that it is only a matter of time before they catch you."
Most incidents take place at open prisons, with some offenders keen to be sent back to closed prison conditions, while others may abscond if they feel they have been refused leave unfairly.
Another reason is prisoners struggling to cope with the drugs culture or feeling threatened within open prisons.
"People have walked free from their open prison and straight to the closed prison, knocked on the gates and said 'take us back in - there are too many drugs in the open prison'," said Smith, who was a career criminal for 35 years but now writes for Inside Time, the national newspaper for prisoners.
"The prison system is very big. There's a lot of drugs. The murder rate is seven times higher than outside. There are a lot of attempted murders and assaults."
Chris, 28, from Nottingham, served three years at HMP Sudbury, an open prison in Derbyshire, towards the end of his sentence for stabbing another man.
He said there were problems with drug-taking inside the prison because the open conditions made it easier to get the drugs in.
"Someone came into my room and said 'do you want to buy some ecstasy?' I said 'no. I'm sitting in a prison cell, why do I want ecstasy?'" he said.
"There were a lot of not very nice people there."
Smith found himself in an open prison - Blantyre House in Kent - only once, in 2008. By this point he "had had enough" and wanted to keep his head down.
But he said prisoners desperate to get away from cellmates taking drugs and tensions between different "classes" of prisoners were common problems.
"You're surrounded by basically petty criminals who are on shorter sentences and don't really give a toss," he said.
"They will start a fight with a lifer who has served 20 years, and the lifer will go back into closed conditions for six or seven years, while the person on the short sentence will get out.
"It's absolute madness. So open prisons for long termers are a very frightening prospect, it is like a minefield."
When prisoners abscond they are usually caught and sent back to prison, where they are likely to stay for longer than if they had not absconded in the first place.
Despite this, 204 prisoners absconded from open prisons in England and Wales between April 2012 and March 2013.
This is a fall from a peak figure of 1,301 absconds in the year 2003-04, but one that still equals an average of one absconder every 43 hours.
In the year 2012-13 a further 431 prisoners failed to return to prison after being given temporary leave.
The POA union, previously known as the Prison Officers' Association, has criticised open prisons for their high absconding record.
"We are concerned at the current allocation system, which resulted in dangerous offenders being placed in open conditions far too early," said spokesman Glyn Travis.
"The union has been campaigning for a change to the current system for seven years and despite our concerns the tickbox mentality of allocating prisoners remains in place."
The POA said while the numbers may have reduced across open prisons, the risk to the public and staff had not reduced.
"No-one really knows why prisoners abscond but staff believe it is because they feel vulnerable, are being bullied and want to avoid the gang culture which exists in most open prisons," Mr Travis said.
"The underlying factor, of course, is that there is little or no consequences for their actions. The recent well-publicised absconds of dangerous offenders must now force the Ministry of Justice to act."
Prisons Minister Jeremy Wright admitted the system "has been too lax up to now" but said the Ministry of Justice was changing that.
"We are not prepared to see public safety compromised," he said.
"In future when prisoners are let out on temporary licence they will be tagged, more strictly risk assessed and tested in the community under strict conditions before being released."
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Sir John Tavener defied doctors' expectations when he resumed composing after a heart attack. Regarded as one of Britain's greatest living composers, he talks about how the possibility of "sudden death at any time" has changed his music, his outlook and his faith.
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By Ian YoungsArts reporter, BBC News
When Sir John Tavener suffered a heart attack in Switzerland in December 2007, he had emergency bypass surgery and spent four months in intensive care.
"They didn't know whether my brain had been damaged," he says.
"My wife had flown over, and she played me Mozart. And I apparently, in my unconscious state, began conducting. So that brought me round again."
The power of music came to Sir John's aid in his hospital bed. That music should connect with something deep within him is perhaps not so far-fetched given his lifelong devotion to harnessing the power of music himself.
The composer has achieved a popularity that is rare in the classical world with choral works that are marked out by their pared-down beauty and intense spirituality.
Music has always been sacred to Sir John, who converted to the Orthodox church in 1977 and has said that "my way towards God has been to write music".
In 1992, The Protecting Veil, for solo cello and strings, topped the classical charts for several months. In 1997, Sir John's Song For Athene was played as the coffin of Princess Diana was carried out of Westminster Abbey during her funeral.
And his A New Beginning was chosen to see in the new century at the end of 1999 in the Millennium Dome in London.
Now he is premiering three new works, all written after his heart attack, at the Manchester International Festival.
"Nobody in the hospital thought I'd get this far," the 69-year-old says. "They didn't think I'd write again."
The new works include one based on a "rather terrifying" short story by Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, in which the central character seeks redemption as he stares into the void of death.
"That was one of the first pieces I wrote after I'd been ill," Sir John says. "And in a way there is a sort of autobiographical slant to it, although I've ritualised it very much.
"It's an extraordinary study of physical agony. He's reviewing his miserable life and then attaining a kind of half peace just at the end."
Another new work, The Love Duet, is "some of the most ecstatic music that I've ever written", he says, taken from what the composer describes as a pantomime about the life of the Hindu deity Krishna.
The third, If Ye Love Me, will be performed by the festival's Sacred Sounds Women's Choir, which draws members from six faiths in the city.
"I was very happy to do it because I think actually all religions have reached a stage of maturity, therefore decay, and, up to a point, senility," Sir John says.
"Therefore to get back to the basis of them is something very exciting to be able to do."
Since the start of the 2000s, Sir John has been open to inspiration from other faiths and has looked beyond his Christian devotion to Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism and Native American beliefs.
"I always go back to what Plato said, that Heaven and Earth were once joined and there was one single primordial being, God," he says.
"And one understands from that, that all religions are equally true, or equally false, I suppose you could say, depending on your perspective.
"I think there will always be a possibility that God doesn't exist because He is infinitude and into that infinitude must come that possibility."
During his most recent illness, he has "had a lot of time to think about what I really feel about these things", Sir John says. "I suppose it's grown me up spiritually."
Does the suggestion that God may not exist reflect a crisis of faith? "When I became ill in Switzerland and I became conscious for the first time, the religious zeal that I had before, I found had gone," he replies.
"But so had my ability to write music. It was about three years without doing anything, I just wanted to lie in a darkened room. And the faith came back in a different way, with writing.
"I think I've been very lucky all my life because the writing and the faith seem to go together."
Sir John has suffered ill health for much of his life. He had a stroke in 1979, and in 1990 was diagnosed with Marfan Syndrome, a hereditary condition that can cause heart defects. He had heart surgery the following year.
These days, composing is a welcome distraction from constant abdominal pain, he says, although he cannot work for more than two hours a day without becoming exhausted.
He claims that, "deep down", he is grateful that his health problems have given him more time to listen to other music and made him a "more sensitive and more caring" person.
"I'm much closer to my family than I've ever been," he says. "I give more time to them. I live through them more. And I feel I only want to write if I feel there's something urgent I have to say.
"The music's become more condensed, I'd say. More terse. I tended to write works that lasted, like seven hours with The Veil of the Temple [in 2003]. But now I would say nothing I write is over 20 minutes."
Despite the physical impediments, is he trying to write as much as he can while he can?
"I've always been aware of mortality because I've always had ill health most of my life," he replies.
"But I suppose much more now because the cardiologist always says to me, 'Sudden death at any time.'
"He's not very cheerful," Sir John adds with a chuckle. "He's a dour Scot. I think he has to cover himself.
"Yes, I'm obviously living with that possibility all the time."
The concert of Sir John Tavener's music is at the Bridgewater Hall, Manchester, on 7 July.
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It was a mystery which sparked countless think pieces: Why did US First Lady Melania Trump wear a $39 jacket emblazoned with "I really don't care, do you?" during a trip to a migrant child detention centre?
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At the time of the June trip, Donald Trump said it was a message to the "Fake News Media".
Her communications chief, however, had insisted it was "just a jacket".
Now we have an answer: Mrs Trump has admitted she was sending a message.
Mrs Trump visited the New Hope Children's Shelter in McAllen, Texas, on 21 June.
The centre housed 55 children, including some separated from their parents as part of the Trump administration's zero-tolerance policy towards illegal immigration.
However, she was criticised for wearing the controversial jacket on her way to the centre and during her return trip, although she took off the jacket before arriving at the centre itself.
There was widespread speculation and criticism over what message Mrs Trump intended to send by wearing the jacket on that particular trip - although her spokeswoman said "there was no hidden message".
However, in an interview with ABC news that was released on Saturday, the former model acknowledged the jacket "was a kind of message, yes".
"It's obvious I didn't wear the jacket for the children, I wore the jacket to go on the plane and off the plane," she said.
"It was for the people and for the left-wing media who are criticising me. I want to show them I don't care. You could criticise whatever you want to say. But it will not stop me to do what I feel is right."
Mrs Trump criticised the media for being "obsessed" about her clothing.
"I often asking myself, if I had not worn that jacket, if I will have so much media coverage," she said, adding: "I would prefer they would focus on what I do and on my initiatives than what I wear."
Mrs Trump's apparent stand delighted supporters, but critics have focused on the fact the admission has caught her team in a lie, and criticised the timing of her message.
Either way, it seems likely what the First Lady wears will continue to be a source of speculation throughout her husband's time in the White House, with commentators now more likely than ever to look for hidden, and not-so-hidden, messages in her outfit choices.
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Two men have been arrested on suspicion of murder after a 23-year-old man was stabbed to death in Lincoln.
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The victim was found with serious knife wounds in the St Giles area of the city on Thursday night and died a short time later, Lincolnshire Police said.
Two men, aged 23 and 24, were arrested in connection with the attack which happened in Coleridge Gardens, the force added.
Detectives have appealed for anyone with information to get in touch.
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The UK's newest aircraft carrier, HMS Prince of Wales, has set sail from the Firth of Forth.
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One of the largest vessels to be operated by the Royal Navy, it is to begin its initial sea trials.
The ship has been built to operate F35B Lightning II Joint Strike fighter jets.
Its sister ship, HMS Queen Elizabeth, was completed two years ago. It is currently crossing the Atlantic to begin operational trials with fighter aircraft in the USA.
All images courtesy of the Royal Navy.
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David Hockney thinks that over his lifetime art has become "less". He blames the art establishment (museums, galleries, art schools) for becoming over-enamoured with conceptual art: "It gave up on images a bit" the artist laments.
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Will GompertzArts editor@WillGompertzBBCon Twitter
By which he means that the artworld ignored figurative art: paintings, sculptures, videos and installations that aim to represent the known world: the sort of work Hockney makes: landscapes, portraits and still lifes.
Instead he feels, museums and galleries have jumped too willingly into the unmade bed of conceptual art where lights go on and off in a game of philosophical riddles. But Hockney says "the power is with images", and in neglecting them the artworld has diminished the very thing it aimed to protect: art.
It's difficult to ignore Hockney's latest images that now fill the vast galleries of the Royal Academy in London. They are huge (two paintings are about 10-metres across), they are innovative (numerous iPad print-outs and an 18-screen film installation), and they are very colourful (purple paths and orange tree trunks aplenty).
By and large, they all depict the same subject: the hills, fields, woods and roads of rural East Yorkshire. These things are subjective, but I found them potent and poetic. And exciting.
Exciting because it has been a rarity over the last half-a-century for a supremely gifted painter to take on the English landscape. Constable and Turner did so in the 19th Century. And John Nash and Stanley Spencer rose to the challenge in the mid-20th Century. But not much has emerged since.
Maybe it's due to the 30 years he has spent in Hollywood that Hockney blames the camera for the hiatus. He directs a damning finger at the one-eyed monster in all its guises: photography, film and television. He believes it is the camera that has caused many of today's artists to forsake figurative art, having decided that a single mechanical lens can capture reality better than any painter or sculptor.
"But they're wrong," he told me. "A camera cannot see what a human can see, there is always something missing." He talks about the inability of a camera to reproduce a sense of space and volume.
He makes the point that a photograph documents only a split second in time. Whereas a landscape painting, portrait or still life might appear to be a moment immortalised in a single image, but it is in fact the culmination of days, weeks and in the case of many artists (Cezanne, Monet, Van Gogh, Gauguin and Hockney), years of looking at a single subject.
It is a result of vast quantities of stored information, experience, jottings and spatial sensitivity that has eventually appeared in the colours, composition and atmosphere of a final finished artwork.
For all his outspokenness David Hockney is a canny man. He twinkles when talking about why he chose to tackle the English landscape, seeing it, I suspect, as an opportunity to make another big splash: a great subject overlooked by most other artists.
When people told him that the "landscape genre was worn out" he thought it illogical. "The way of looking at it [the landscape] might be worn out, but the landscape can't be," he said. "It needs re-looking at…[to] look at it afresh."
Which is exactly what he has done. And it looks like Hockney on Yorkshire will be a hit with the public as advance bookings are already at the upper end of the Royal Academy's expectations. But I wonder if the show will have a more lasting impact than simply to re-assert the general feeling that the Bradford-born painter is the country's greatest living artist.
I think it is possible that it could mark the moment - together with the Lucian Freud exhibition that will be opening shortly at the nearby at the National Portrait Gallery - when figurative art once again starts to become the dominant genre in the contemporary exhibitions and displays mounted at the likes of Tate, Paris's Pompidou and New York's Museum of Modern Art.
The paintings of urban Coventry by George Shaw were shortlisted for last year's Turner Prize. He didn't win. But maybe this year will be different, and an artist who produces landscapes or portraits or still lifes will carry the day?
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Europe and Russia are cementing their plans to explore Mars together.
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By Jonathan AmosScience correspondent, BBC News, Naples
European Space Agency member states have approved the agreement that would see Russia take significant roles in Red Planet missions in 2016 and 2018.
The former is a satellite that will look for methane and other trace gases in the atmosphere; the latter will be a surface rover.
Russian participation fills a void left by the Americans who pulled back from the projects earlier this year.
For a while, it looked as though the ventures, known as ExoMars, might have to be cancelled. But Russian desire to pick up many of the elements dropped by the US means ExoMars is now on a much surer footing.
Esa member states indicated their happiness with the cooperation text on Monday. All that remains is for the documentation to be signed by both parties.
This is likely to happen before the end of the year.
'Other opportunities'
Officials say they want the ExoMars partnership to be the catalyst for further planetary exploration ventures.
"We have other opportunities to consider cooperation - for Jupiter missions, for example," said Frederic Nordlund, the head of international relations at Esa.
"Esa has selected Juice, a large mission for Jupiter, and in Russia there is a plan for a Ganymede lander which is of interest to Europe.
"We are initiating discussions to see how we could co-operate on those missions. But this could extend to lunar robotics where we would like to see if we could join forces as well.
"Russia already has its Luna-Glob and Luna-Resurs missions, which are already being implemented, but we're considering other opportunities for this in other areas."
The planned agreement calls for Russia to provide the Proton rockets to send the two ExoMars missions on their way.
Russia would also get instrument space on the 2016 satellite and the 2018 rover. In addition, its researchers would join the science teams that exploit the missions' data.
One key contribution would be the landing system that places the rover on the surface of the Red Planet. With the exception of some key components, this would be built by Russian industry.
ExoMars was formally initiated in Europe by ministers in 2005, and Esa has so far spent in excess of 400m euros on technology development.
The final budget on the European side is projected to be about 1.2bn euros for the two missions.
So far, 850m of that total has been committed. But officials remain confident of closing the gap.
The 2016 orbiter will try to track down the sources of methane that have been observed at Mars. Its presence in the atmosphere is intriguing and could conceivably indicate biological activity on the planet. A key role for the satellite also will be to provide the communications relay for the 2018 rover.
The six-wheeled vehicle would look for signs of past or present life. It would have the ability to drill 2m into the ground.
[email protected] and follow me on Twitter: @BBCAmos
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A wide-ranging conspiracy theory about elite Satan-worshiping paedophiles has migrated from the US, inspiring a series of regular street protests. How did QAnon find a British audience?
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By Shayan SardarizadehAnti-disinformation unit
On a sunny day in late August, nearly 500 people gathered in central London. It was the first event held by a new group, Freedom for the Children UK.
As the crowd marched from the London Eye to Buckingham Palace, chants of "Save our children!" echoed in the air.
The ethnically diverse crowd was made up mostly of young people and women, some with their children. At the head of the march were group leaders Laura Ward and Lucy Davis.
Ms Ward, 36, who says she underwent a "spiritual awakening" during the Covid-19 lockdown, created a Facebook group in July "to promote and organise peaceful events that raise the awareness of child exploitation and human trafficking". It took off, gathering thousands of followers in just a few weeks.
The London march was just one of 10 rallies held across the UK, including events in Birmingham, Bristol and Manchester. A Liverpool rally drew similar numbers of people.
The organisers say their movement is not directly linked with QAnon, a wide-ranging, baseless, pro-Trump conspiracy theory.
But their themes are similar, and their evidence-free claims largely the same. And when images began to appear on the FFTCUK Facebook group later that day, placards, signs and items of clothing directly referencing QAnon were prevalent at almost all of the rallies.
What is QAnon?
QAnon began life - most likely as a joke or prank - on extreme message boards in 2017. It's an unfounded conspiracy theory that claims President Trump is secretly battling a clandestine network of Satan-worshipping elites who run a child trafficking ring.
The "Q" in QAnon is the person or persons writing cryptic messages to the movement's followers. Q claims to have top secret clearance within the US government. Q has told followers to "trust the plan" for a "great awakening". The messages have predicted mass arrests or purges of top Democratic Party officials. And none of the prognostications have come true.
Despite its bizarre premises, QAnon took off in niche online communities and rapidly grew on social networks.
BBC Trending
What is #SaveOurChildren?
Until this year, the conspiracy theory was confined to the internet's fringes. But then came the pandemic. QAnon influencers took advantage of fear, uncertainty and doubt - and the fact that many people were at home, worried, and living more of their lives online.
Surveys from the Pew Research Center indicate that the number of Americans who are aware of QAnon and support its ideas increased substantially this year. Supporters have been linked to several violent crimes.
In light of this, several major social networks including Twitter, Facebook and TikTok began restricting QAnon terms, phrases and hashtags on their platforms over the summer.
Believers changed tack. Urged by a Q message to "learn the use of camouflage digitally", followers avoided direct references to QAnon and began hijacking well-known, established hashtags and phrases used by genuine campaigners against child trafficking - such as the innocuous sounding #SaveTheChildren and #SaveOurChildren.
A BBC analysis based on data from Facebook-owned tool CrowdTangle, and Spredfast, found that in the last three months, the two hashtags were used a total of 1.5 million times on Twitter and generated more than 28 million interactions on public Facebook and Instagram posts.
And outside the US, British followers lead the way. Our analysis of online data from the last three months puts the UK ahead of all European countries, followed by Germany and the Netherlands.
Marc-Andre Argentino, a researcher at Concordia University in Montreal, has identified at least 114 Facebook groups which spread QAnon content under the guise of campaigning against child trafficking.
Membership of such groups has risen by more than 3,000 percent since July, he says.
A key British YouTube influencer is Charlie Ward, who lives in Spain and began uploading QAnon-themed videos during lockdown.
While older clips about his personal life received barely any attention, his channel now boasts more than 170,000 subscribers and he has hosted discussions with FFTCUK leaders.
Mr Ward did not respond to a request for comment.
How did it take off in the UK?
In May, Ms Ward (no relation to Mr Ward) began engaging with social media posts by conspiracy theorist David Icke and a number of QAnon influencers in the US and Canada about Covid-19 lockdowns, George Floyd protests, and global child trafficking.
"I'm feeling powerless and I want to do more to create change. What do you suggest?" she tweeted at a Canadian QAnon influencer.
A few weeks later, inspired by a global "Save Our Children" movement launched by a California-based rapper and actor, Ms Ward set up the FFTCUK Facebook group with the aim of launching a similar movement at home.
By the end of August, Save Our Children street rallies were held in more than 200 towns and cities around the world, including a dozen in the UK.
The FFTCUK Facebook group has now amassed more than 13,000 members. While moderators are cautious about direct references to QAnon, discussion in the group is peppered with QAnon-related talk and hashtags.
Members also routinely organise coordinated online campaigns targeting news organisations.
For instance, when an independent magazine published a piece about a local FFTCUK rally, its Facebook page was swamped by comments that abused its staff. This, coupled with threats of violence, led the magazine to temporarily deactivate its social media accounts.
On their personal accounts, FFTCUK leaders are vocal about their beliefs.
Ms Ward's Twitter and Facebook accounts feature frequent accusations of paedophilia against leading US Democrats, and she regularly defends QAnon and its followers. She turned down an interview request for this story.
Why is QAnon spreading during the pandemic?
The vast majority of the protesters on the FFTCUK march in August ignored Covid-19 restrictions and social distancing guidelines.
As they finished the march and gathered near Wellington Arch for a meditation session, Ms Ward talked about a "fake pandemic".
While most of the UK rallies are organised by Ms Ward and FFTCUK, one in London was co-organised by StandUPX, a campaign group behind rallies featuring speakers such as David Icke. The rallies attract a wide range of speakers and attendees, from those who oppose government restrictions to those who claim that the pandemic is a "hoax" or somehow caused by 5G technology.
A spokesperson for StandUPX said: "We cannot be accountable for the views of each and everyone appearing at the rally and have no views about QAnon."
Experts say a number of national controversies and scandals in relation to elite child abuse had already primed the UK for the rise of conspiratorial narratives.
"Activists in the UK have easily woven British issues - such as Operation Yewtree investigations into historical child sexual abuse - into Q narratives," says David Lawrence, a researcher for the campaign group Hope not Hate.
"Long before the birth of QAnon, prominent British conspiracy theorists have promoted ideas about elite, occult paedophile circles engaging in large-scale child trafficking and abuse, and British activists are drawing on this broader tradition," he says.
And the upheaval of the pandemic created a perfect storm which helped QAnon find common ground with Covid-19 conspiracists.
"Public trust in institutions has declined in the UK in recent years, and has been exacerbated by the handling of the pandemic," Mr Lawrence added. "This has provided ideal conditions for conspiracy theories to spread."
What do Save Our Children protesters believe in?
Two weeks after their first protests, FFTCUK held a bigger protest in London on 5 September. Around 1,000 people marched from Oxford Street to the BBC's Broadcasting House, and then to Parliament Square.
The protesters paused outside the Disney Store on Oxford Street. "Shame on you," they angrily chanted, echoing a widely-held, evidence-free belief among QAnon followers that the company is part of a child trafficking cabal.
Once again, women and young people were at the forefront of the march.
People were dressed in QAnon shirts or ones displaying the slogan "WWG1WGA". Short for "Where we go one we go all", it is the best-known rallying cry for QAnon believers.
Other bizarre terms - albeit ones well-known to QAnon followers - were on display: "adrenochrome", "frazzledrip", "dark to light", "spirit cooking", "paedogate".
One marcher held up a placard referencing Pizzagate, a conspiracy theory that alleged Hillary Clinton and Democratic Party politicians were running a paedophile ring out of a Washington pizza restaurant. It prompted a heavily armed man to enter the restaurant, searching for non-existent child prisoners. He was later sentenced to four years in prison.
In London, the vast majority of the protesters I spoke to said they first heard about FFTCUK via social media, especially Facebook.
Some said they fully believed in QAnon and followed every Q message, while others were only partially familiar with it. There were supporters of President Trump, people who don't like him very much, and those that said they don't pay much attention to politics.
However, they all shared a strong suspicion of the establishment, coupled with the belief that there is a "deep state" of elites in the UK who are committing crimes against children with impunity.
"Pizzagate is 100% true," said Jada, a young protester. "There are paedophiles in our elite everywhere and they need to be taken down. This is happening in the US, in the UK and all over the world."
"I'm not sure if I'm QAnon, I don't follow that stuff much," said Audrey, another young protester. "But the deep state is not a secret, it's not a conspiracy theory."
And although she said she was initially not a fan of President Trump, her opinion has recently changed.
"He's doing a lot of good but that's not being shown on TV," she said.
What do legitimate charities say?
Charities and professionals who work to fight real child abuse and human trafficking say the conspiracy theorists aren't helping by supposedly "raising awareness". In fact, they say they're distracting attention away from real crimes and authentic issues.
Laura Duran, senior policy and research officer at Every Child Protected Against Trafficking, says QAnon's false claims about child trafficking are "a slap in the face of survivors who have gone through exploitation".
As an example, she cites the viral Wayfair conspiracy theory, which claimed in June that a US-based furniture retailer was involved in trafficking children.
The viral, untrue rumours caused "a significant level of trauma and distress to child trafficking survivors," Ms Duran says.
Why is it appealing to women?
Although QAnon has always had female followers, the sudden shift towards #SaveOurChildren seems to have brought into fold even larger numbers of women, some via health, yoga and wellness Facebook groups and Instagram accounts.
The majority of the FFTCUK Facebook group's admins are women, and a few come from wellness communities.
"Early barrages of viral disinformation in the UK lockdown spread 5G and 'fake virus' narratives, both of which found their way into anti-vaccination communities and then wellness groups," says Joe Ondrak, a senior investigator at Logically, a tech startup that fights online disinformation.
"From here concerned 'Facebook mums' and other well-meaning parents stuck online started doing 'research'" - in the conspiracy world, this usually means watching YouTube videos and trawling fringe websites - "or finding videos reasserting conspiracy beliefs," he says.
Annie Kelly co-presents the weekly QAnon Anonymous podcast, which investigates the movement. She also reported on the first FFTCUK rally in London. She says by focusing on highly emotive content about child safety, #SaveOurChildren has managed to "worm its way into normal, basically apolitical parenting groups".
On Instagram, "soft" QAnon narratives have crept into content posted by female lifestyle influencers with tens of thousands of followers.
Mothers who spend time in online communities where concerns about children's products and content are shared have been a key driver of the new wave of QAnon believers, Ms Kelly adds.
"They can very easily become influencers themselves by sharing things they've noticed which they think add to the conspiracy," she notes.
The demographic makeup of the UK marches is significant, the experts say, as it does not match the stereotypical crowd of young men drawn from the right and the far-right.
"These weren't your typically 'red-pilled' conspiracy theorists," says Nick Backovic, a contributing editor at Logically. "They were worried mums and dads who had been scared into believing these exaggerated stats that aren't backed up by any evidence."
Growth continues
In terms of size and appeal, the British QAnon movement is still fringe compared to the US, where the conspiracy has leaked into the mainstream. A number of politicians who have previously endorsed QAnon are set to win seats in Congress and state or local legislatures in November's elections.
But the growth of QAnon in the UK also shows no sign of stopping.
Every Sunday, Ms Ward and Ms Davis broadcast on Facebook Live to update members about their plans and discuss ways to spread the message.
The FFTCUK group keeps adding members, and further events are planned.
Follow Shayan on Twitter.
Subscribe to the BBC Trending podcast or follow us on Twitter @BBCtrending or Facebook.
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There was all the pageantry of a real space launch.
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By Richard GalpinBBC News, Moscow
The six "astronauts" wearing bright blue jump-suits and even surgical masks, were paraded before banks of television cameras and hordes of journalists at a news conference before entering their mock spaceship.
Amongst the long rows of VIPs at the news conference were senior officials from the United States, China and the European Union.
If, as some experts believe, the main aim of the Mars 500 experiment is to publicise the concept of human flight to the red planet, then it has surely succeeded beyond all expectations.
"I am very happy to be part of this project," said Diego Urbina, the Colombian-Italian and most extrovert member of the crew.
"It will raise awareness of space flight so hopefully a few years from now there will be a real flight to Mars."
He confessed that Elton John had been his inspiration.
"I don't know if you know that song Rocket Man," he asked.
"I want a future like that… where people will be going frequently into space and will be working there and it will be very usual."
In front of the world's media, all the team spoke confidently about the chances of the experiment being successful - in other words that noone would crack under the stress of such lengthy confinement in such claustrophobic and bizarre conditions and demand to be let out.
"The target is for all six of us to be here for 520 days," said the French crew-member Romain Charles who took a guitar with him into the cluster of brown and silver-coloured metal tubes which will be home until November 2011.
After the news conference, the six crew disappeared, re-emerging an hour later by the entrance hatch to the mock spaceship, where they put on another high-spirited performance for the media.
Finally, blowing kisses and waving to wives, girlfriends and relatives, they walked up the steps and through the entrance hatch.
A solemn-faced official slowly closed and sealed it behind them.
So now reality bites for the six-member volunteer crew.
What will they be thinking as they sit inside their tin cans in north-west Moscow where outside the warm sun shines and the flowers blossom?
There is no thrill of a blast-off and flight through space.
There are no windows from which to watch the Earth gradually shrink away.
And no anticipation of reaching a new world more than fifty million kilometres away.
Instead, silent inertia, stale air and tinned food.
And everywhere cameras watching their every move, looking out for signs of mental collapse.
They have just one thing to cling on to, that they are playing their part in the history of space exploration.
That their success in this experiment will mean a human flight to Mars is a step closer.
And space experts already believe the first flight could be just 25 years away or even less if there is the political and economic will from countries with advanced space programmes.
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Nine people have been rescued after getting cut off by an incoming tide at Rhyl.
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Five adults and four children were spotted in difficulty on a sandbank 200m (656ft) off Rhyl seafront on Friday at about 19:34 BST.
The adults were carrying the children in waist-deep water by the time Rhyl RNLI's inshore lifeboat crew reached the group.
All nine people were taken on board and returned to shore safely.
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Up to 11 jobs are under threat at the Manx Department of Community, Culture and Leisure, a spokesman has confirmed.
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Public Transport Division staff have been told savings were needed as the department was anticipating financial difficulties next year.
The department said it had "no option but to consider making savings from salaries budgets".
However, it said it was still early in the process and no decision on redundancies had been made.
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Dutch investigators say the damage to Malaysia Airlines flight MH17, which crashed in eastern Ukraine on 17 July, suggests it was pierced by a large number of objects from outside the plane.
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They reveal that a few minutes before the plane went down, the pilots asked to move a few nautical miles north of their flight path because of weather conditions.
The Dutch Safety Board says its preliminary report was based on the contents of the flight and cockpit data recorders, other communication with the plane, as well as forensic examination of the wreckage where possible.
These are its key findings:
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The Old Etonian apparently due to be named as the new head of the established church has a huge, unsustainable financial deficit to shrink - which is perhaps redolent of the challenge faced by another Old Etonian who became head of government in 2010.
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Robert PestonEconomics editor
A bit like David Cameron who inherited a gap between tax revenues and public expenditure equivalent to a horrid 10% of GDP, one of the most pressing problems to be faced by Justin Welby as the new Archbishop of Canterbury is a massive hole in the fund that pays the pensions of retired clergy.
I am told that the current Bishop of Durham, a former oil industry executive, is good with money. He will need to be.
A new report on the Clergy Pension Scheme by the Archbishops' Pensions Task Group points out that the deficit in the fund -which is liable for all clergy pensions earned after January 1998 - ballooned from £262m to a peak of £507m in November 2011.
The Task Group includes the First Church Commissioner, Andreas Whittam-Smith, an unusually saintly and numerate erstwhile hack - who gave me my big break in journalism, by recruiting me to help launch the Independent newspaper in 1986 (goodness it feels such a long time ago).
He and his two colleagues believe the deficit has "fallen back somewhat", but that the December 2012 actuarially measured deficit will be somewhat greater than it was three years ago.
How much greater? Well a research note by the pensions consultant John Ralfe calculates the hole at the end of last month as approximately £500m.
This represents quite a potential burden for parishioners. Ralfe calculates that without further reductions in pensions payable to clergy, individual dioceses would have to make contributions to the fund equivalent to a staggering 60% of the value of salaries, up from an already high 38.2% (clergy themselves don't make contributions to the cost of their pensions; the liability falls on their employer).
Now the Task Group is clear that it would be wrong to rush into draconian pension cuts or radical overhaul of pension provision. But it notes the need to "balance the financial pressures on funders with the obligation to protect the interest of future pensioners".
There are a few salient points to make. First, clergy pensions would not be seen by many as lavish and egregious. For example, the pensions of the Archbishops of York and Canterbury will be in a range from £21,000 and £28,000, according to the annual report of the Church's Pensions Board - so perhaps 2% or 3% of the pension Mr Welby might have earned if he had got to the top of one of the oil companies that employed him in days of yore.
Second, the Church is jolly unusual in retaining its faith in equities or shares.
As you will know, there has been a huge shift by most pension funds out of shares and into bonds. And as the FT points out this morning, for the first time ever UK pension funds now hold more bonds than equities: the Pensions Regulator shows that UK funds hold 43% of their assets in gilts and fixed-interest debt compared with just under 39% in equities.
But the Church did not join this herd galloping into the debt sold by governments and companies. On my calculations of the asset allocation in the Church of England Funded Pensions Scheme, 84% is held in shares, property and derivatives - or what are perceived to be riskier assets.
As it happens, the Church's unfashionable refusal to abandon the cult of the equity has not gone wholly unrewarded: over the three years to the end of December 2012, the return on the assets was 7.1% per annum, which compares quite well with some mammon-obsessed hedge funds.
'Through the roof'
The problem - characteristic of the pensions industry in general - is that liabilities have gone through the roof. And the proximate cause is the soaring price of bonds, and the collapse in the yield on those bonds.
The explanation is that the earth-bound Pensions Regulator has less faith than the vicars in equities. So the way it measures liabilities is to calculate the quantity of assets a pension fund should ideally hold to meet future pension payments if all those assets were in low-risk bonds.
What this means is that when the income generated by bonds falls, as it has been doing, any pension fund would theoretically have to hold massively more of those bonds to meet the cost of future pension payments. And the point is that for all the decent performance of the shares and property held by the Church's pension scheme, their aggregate value is several hundreds of millions of pounds less than would be needed if they were cashed in and converted into allegedly safer bonds.
There is of course a very interesting question whether the risk aversion of the regulator is more or less rational than the priesthood's apparent appetite for risk. But the problem for the new Archbishop is that on this sort of non-spiritual, fiduciary issue, his authority is rather less than that of the officers of the state.
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Fifty years ago Singapore became an independent state, after leaving the short-lived Malaysian Federation. With no natural resources, just how did this tiny country go from swamp to one of the region's leading economies? On the strength of its human resources - immigrants like my grandfather.
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By Sharanjit LeylBBC, Singapore
At the age of 17, with only the shirt on his back, Fauja Singh left his parents in a small Punjabi village and made the long and dusty journey on foot and by train to Kolkata (Calcutta), where he caught a ship to his new home. It was the early 1930s.
He arrived in a melting pot of cultures and chaos on an island at the mouth of a river, which bustled with trade - Singapore.
Once a swamp-filled jungle, when the British arrived in 1819, under the leadership of Sir Stamford Raffles, the makings of modern Singapore began. Lying at the mid-point of the shipping route between India and China, it became a thriving trading port, and with this trade came a huge influx of immigrants from all over Asia.
Life was not easy for the new arrivals. Many from China worked as labourers and lived in squalid and cramped conditions. Fauja worked in jobs ranging from night watchman to milk vendor and moneylender. When he had made enough money he went home to fetch his brother, sister and young bride from Amritsar.
Fauja and his wife Swaran Kaur had eight children. His eldest son Kernail excelled academically and made it to the country's most prestigious school, Raffles Institution. He went on to win scholarships at university and after graduating he joined the government of a young and newly independent nation.
Fauja Singh was my grandfather, and Kernail my father. They paved the way for me to be educated and well-off. It's a story that echoes that of many Singaporeans, and also of the nation itself.
Singaporeans are among the world's wealthiest populations - Ferraris and Rolls Royces are a common sight on the clean streets. It's a far cry from the island's humble beginnings, when more than a million Singaporeans lived in "squatters" - makeshift wooden houses in villages known by the Malay term "kampongs".
My father and his siblings grew up on a large plot of land that sits in current-day Bukit Merah, an area in central Singapore whose name means "Red Hill". My grandfather claimed the land by planting a perimeter of banana trees which formed dense foliage and kept others out. Then he built a house so large, he would later rent out its back rooms to lodgers. But the house, like many at the time, was rudimentary.
My aunt, Manjit Kaur, was born there in pre-independence Singapore. "It was a hard life. There was no water, no healthy water," she says. "We lived a simple life, our neighbours were simple. We looked after each other and we had the same goal - to survive."
In 1959, Britain took the first steps toward granting independence by allowing Singapore to govern itself. The charismatic Lee Kuan Yew of the People's Action Party won a landslide victory in the first fully elected parliament.
Manjit remembers the family attended a political rally, despite not speaking the language. "We didn't understand a word but I think whatever he was saying must have been quite important because everyone was paying attention. They clapped every time he would say something. When they clapped, we clapped," she says.
This was a revelation to me - I had no idea my grandfather had had any interest in politics.
In August 1963, Singapore joined the Federation of Malaysia. It was made up of four countries and territories - Malaya, North Borneo, Sarawak and Singapore.
Manjit remembers celebrating the union at school. "We started learning a song called something like Let's Get Together, Sing a Happy Song, Malaysia Forever."
But it wasn't forever. The members of the federation disagreed on fundamental issues like who should control the finances of Singapore. Racial tensions led to riots between Singaporean Chinese and Malay groups.
In 1965, Singapore was forced to leave the Malaysian Federation. Manjit remembers seeing the prime minister of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, cry during an interview. "We'd go to our neighbours' house and watch TV and we saw him crying and we didn't know why."
It was a traumatic beginning to independence. Many believed Singapore could not survive on its own. But with huge hopes for the future, Singapore began to build the infrastructure that would transform the city.
My grandfather sold his plot of land to the government in the 1960s and moved into a HDB or Housing Development Board home, thousands of which were sprouting up all over the island. It was an affordable way for Singaporeans to buy property and raise their standard of living.
"We had a huge task when we first started in 1960. At that time our population size was 1.6 million, out of that, 1.3 million lived in squatters - not to count thousands of others living in slum areas and old buildings," says Liu Thai Ker, who was known as Singapore's "master planner" in the 70s and 80s. The new HDB towns that Liu oversaw came with their own schools, shops and clinics. The high-rise buildings introduced many Singaporeans to the miracles of flushing toilets and clean water at the turn of a tap.
By 1985, in just one generation, Liu says, the HDB was so successful in its rehousing policy that Singapore could claim to have "no homeless, no squatters, no poverty ghettos and no ethnic enclaves".
But the housing policy was not just about bricks and mortar - it was also about nation building. Each HDB flat would have a quota system that encouraged a mix of different races. "The whole idea was to have the Chinese not thinking that they were Chinese, or the Malays thinking they're Malay, or Indians thinking they're Indian. We want them to think as one Singaporean," says Liu.
Nation building also took the form of campaigns to instil more courtesy, prevent spitting in public or stop creating "killer litter" - rubbish thrown out of high-rise flats that could kill people below. These campaigns dominated the airwaves, schools and billboards of the nation.
The government sought to regulate the behaviour of its people and I was not immune. As a child attending a Singaporean primary school I won the title of most courteous student in class several times. My reward was a Singha the Lion eraser or ruler. He was the country's courtesy mascot for years.
Some of the campaigns were arguably too successful, such as the "Stop at two" campaign, aimed at limiting population growth in the 1960s and 1970s. When it became evident that Singapore's population wasn't being replaced in the 1980s, it was too late. Singapore now has one of the lowest birth rates in Asia, which the government is seeking to offset through immigration. For a population to remain stable each family needs to have 2.1 children - in Singapore the average is 1.3 or below.
Such campaigns were more than just slogans - they had policies to back them up. Third children were penalised with fewer subsidies and limited school choices.
By the 1980s, many of Singapore's early problems had been solved. Unemployment was no longer a worry, crime rates were low, and the population compliant.
But at what price? The measures the government took to maintain the status quo are seen by many as controlling and restrictive.
The penal system is tough, and the death penalty is enforced, mostly for drug offences. It is estimated that abound 400 people have been hanged since 1991. Singapore has been described as "Disneyland with the death penalty."
Goh Chok Tong, who was Singapore's prime minister from 1990 to 2004 and now holds the title emeritus senior minister, takes issue with that description. "First of all, Singapore is not Disneyland, it's a very serious place. Then the death penalty, because of the proximity to the drug triangle, if we're too lax in the control of drug trafficking, Singaporeans are going to suffer. So it's a difficult decision, but we have to defend our position on that," he says.
Singapore's media environment is highly controlled. The nation currently ranks in the bottom 15% of 180 countries in an index assessing press freedoms compiled by Reporters Without Borders.
Singaporeans with an alternative view on political matters have now turned to the internet - Ariffin Sha, a 17-year-old blogger says the internet is the "game changer", dispelling the fears Singaporeans used to harbour over speaking out.
"I believe there was a climate of fear in Singapore, and I don't blame them. Dissent was clearly not tolerated. Times have changed now. With the internet it's hard to control," says Sha. At Speaker's Corner, the only officially sanctioned area of protest, 500 people might hear him speak - whereas on YouTube he has an audience of thousands.
The arts battle censorship too - playwrights have to submit scripts to Singapore's Media Development Authority who may insist on changing lines or put an advisory on the play. "When we first started working in the 80s we had to submit scripts to the police," says Haresh Sharma, a prominent name in Singapore's theatre community. "Now it's a bit more sophisticated. They might give you a rating but then people are free to choose."
Goh says there are certain areas in the media where control will continue to be exercised.
"Religions, race… if you touch on sensitive issues there will be violent reactions so those are no-nos. The government has to make sure people don't infringe on these."
After years of rapid growth and ranked the most expensive city in the world by the Economist Intelligence Unit, Singapore faces new challenges. The gap between rich and poor is amongst the widest in the developed world. Estimates from social researchers suggest that about 10% to 15% of the population live in the low income bracket - less than US$1,100 (£700) a month.
If my grandfather arrived today, with only the shirt on his back, how would he fare? He might not be as welcome. Foreigners now make up 40% of the population and the huge rise in their numbers in the last decade has sparked fears that the Singaporean identity is being diluted.
Jim Rogers is a businessman who moved to Singapore at a time when it was eager to attract well-qualified foreigners. He's aware of the backlash. "You'll hear people talking about the foreigners, and I say: 'Wait a minute you're second generation - your parents came here.' And they'll say: 'Yeah, but it was different. My parents were different to these new immigrants who are coming here now.'"
The government has responded with stricter rules limiting the influx of immigrants, but Rogers hopes they remember Singapore's success was built on them.
At the same time, people are leaving - the high cost of living and the search for a better work-life balance has led many to move away. In a 2012 survey, 56% of the 2000-odd Singaporeans surveyed said they would migrate if given a choice.
This too is reflected in my own family. My two brothers and their children now live in the US and my mother joined them there after my father passed away. The majority of my grandfather's huge family, captured in a photograph in 1970, no longer live in Singapore. Only three of his 15 grandchildren still do. I chose to return after many years away in the US, Canada and Japan. What made me come back? The same reasons my grandfather came - opportunity.
Where our leafy family home once stood there is now a big grey industrial complex. But growing up in a country where things are constantly changing, you don't expect things to last. There is always a steadfast march towards progress.
Watch A Richer World: Singapore at 50 on BBC World News on Sat 28 Feb at 09:10 GMT and 20:10 GMT, or Sun 1 Mar at 02:10 GMT and 15:10 GMT.
For more on the BBC's A Richer World, go to www.bbc.com/richerworld - or join the discussion on Twitter #BBCRicherWorld
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"It's been a year of hell. When I go to bed at night and take my t-shirt off, the scars will always be there in the mirror. The pain in my shoulder is still there. The skin graft sites are painful."
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By Jodie SmithBBC News
Wayne Ingold's life was turned upside down on 8 August 2014 when he opened the communal front door to the block of flats where he lived in Witham, Essex.
Unbeknown to him, on the other side of the door were two youths waiting to throw acid in his face.
A victim of mistaken identity, the 57-year-old was left with life-changing injuries and scars.
He said: "I'd been at a friend's the night before and got back about 10:35am. I went to check my mail box and saw a figure outside the front door.
"I opened it and the lad outside said "55", which was the number of the top floor flat. But another lad came round the round the corner with a bottle of what looked like fizzy drink.
"He started throwing it in my face and within seconds I realised it was acid.
"I put my right hand up to check my face, and that was burnt too. I ran inside thinking 'What do I do now?'.
"I looked in the mirror, my face was yellow and looked like melting candle wax. I dialled 999 and the police and ambulance turned up not long afterwards.
"The first policeman who saw me nearly fainted because of the state I was in."
Mr Ingold said the quick actions of paramedics who washed his face saved much of his skin "or it could have been 10 times worse".
He was taken to Broomfield Hospital in Chelmsford, where doctors from a specialist burns unit performed skin grafts to repair the damage to his face and upper body.
"They had to put up a chemical attack tent in the hospital. I was on morphine and pain killers," he said.
"The surgeon told me the wound in my right shoulder was so deep they had to cut the flesh away and replace it with cow fat."
The trial of two teenage boys charged over the attack heard Mr Ingold was in the "wrong place at the wrong time" when he opened the front door that day.
"At first I thought, 'what was it all about, why me?' But now I know it wasn't me they were targeting," Mr Ingold said.
Essex Police confirmed the intended victim of the acid attack had never been found.
Mr Ingold said: "If I came face to face with them, I'd ask them 'Why did you do it? How would you have felt, your family felt, if someone had done it to you?'
"Their arrogance and attitude amazes me. There's no respect. I could see them laughing and making faces at me in court.
"When I gave evidence, I had to have a screen up so I didn't have to look at their faces while I was talking about what happened."
The trial at Chelmsford Crown Court, which was just over a week long, also heard evidence from the accused - Aarron Isaac, 19, of Elverson Road, Lewisham, south London, and a 16-year-old boy who cannot be named due to his age.
The teenagers were convicted after three and a half hours of jury deliberations and will be sentenced at the same court on 6 November.
"Now I can move on with my life and put this whole sorry saga to bed", Mr Ingold said.
"I've got to go back to hospital in November to see a specialist. Broomfield has been fantastic. I always give credit where it's due.
"People say I sound a bit light-hearted when I keep saying everyone was fantastic. But being light-hearted is my coping mechanism."
Mr Ingold said he had received counselling earlier this year and was still trying his best to recover from the attack.
"It's horrific, but without the paramedics, I'd be a damn sight worse.
"The mental scars will take a lot longer to heal. But you've got to carry on and get on with life as best you can."
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Slovenia's two most senior Catholic clerics have resigned over a financial scandal said to have cost the Church up to 800m euros (£700m; $1bn).
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Pope Francis has accepted the resignation of the Archbishop of Ljubljana, Anton Stres, and the Archbishop of Maribor, Marjan Turnsek.
They resigned under rules for bishops who "become unsuited for fulfilment" for their office, the Vatican said.
The archdiocese of Maribor suffered the losses on investments in businesses.
When news of the losses broke in 2011, Maribor's previous Archbishop, Franc Kramberger, resigned.
Both of the current archbishops were involved in Maribor's finances but face no allegations of criminal misconduct, the Associated Press news agency reports.
Pope Francis has preached against waste, financial or otherwise, since becoming head of the Church earlier this year.
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The M25 is celebrating its 25th birthday. The 117-mile (188km) road that orbits London has changed life in the UK in many ways, says Radio 2's traffic news announcer Sally Boazman. Here are some.
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It took more than 11 years to build, cost £1bn and used more than two million tonnes of concrete and 3.5 million tonnes of asphalt. The M25 is a monster of a road in many ways.
The final section was opened by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in October 1986 to a huge fanfare. It has gone on to change many things, including our economy, environment and living habits. Here are just some:
1. Partying was changed forever for many young people. In the early 1990s the rave scene developed around the M25. Tens of thousands of young people would drive around it or gather at service stations, waiting for a phone call or someone to tell them which nearby field would be the location of that week's party. "All that needed to be known was that these raves would take place somewhere on the periphery of the M25. You basically set off in the direction of it," says DJ Judge Jules. The scene created headlines, spread across the country and resulted in changes to the law.
2. Business spread from the capital in a way that wouldn't have been possible if it wasn't for the M25. Emma Goodford, a property consultant who specialises in the areas surrounding the M25, says that as a result of its presence a commercial market has developed outside central London. "I've seen it become a place where business really begins to happen. There's now in the M25 area 130 million square feet of space and that's the equivalent I suppose of 100 towers at Canary Wharf. And if you think the city of London in total is about 170 million square feet, this is a big, big catchment area in terms of employment."
3. Became a verbal reference when referring to London and the rest of the country. The phrases "inside the M25" and "outside the M25" are a common part of our language, both colloquially and officially. The Communications Act 2003 explicitly uses the M25 as the boundary.
4. Helped galvanise the anti-roads movement. Labelled by many as the "UK's biggest car park", the M25 got many questioning our relationship with the car. Soon after it opened traffic levels were exceeding maximum designed capacity. Several widening schemes have been announced over the years, sparking public inquiry after public inquiry. Some were carried out and others successfully challenged by protesters. "Its like digging a ditch in a bog, it always fills up," says Stephen Joseph, chief executive of the Campaign for Better Transport.
5. Increased house prices for many. Before the M25, areas just outside London were a mixture of small rural farms and commuter belt. But its arrival helped those commuters get on their way faster, pushing house prices in such areas higher. "We know from our research that house prices generally have gone up about 300% since the M25 opened in 1986," says Anthony Wardell from Knight Franks estate agents. On the western side of London, house prices have gone up nearer to 400%, he adds.
6. Built business empires. "They were talking about building this big orbital road and at that time I just thought it was another A road or a small motorway," says Ray Coleman of Lantern Recovery, a roadside recovery company. "We used to run probably at that time about 10 or 12 trucks. Once the M25 did open, I think on that particular day we did about seven jobs, from there on in it was an everyday occurrence. We operate now 220 trucks."
7. Got creative juices following. Novelist Iain Sinclair walked anti-clockwise around the motorway in 2000 for his book London Orbital. It also inspired the name of dance group Orbital, plus many of their songs.
8. Became a tourist destination. In its early days this great lump of tarmac held a strange allure for many. People came from all over the country to ride on it. Some even took coach excursions around it.
9. Changed the way people plan their lives, says M25 expert Chris Marshall. "You can get around London in ways that you couldn't do before and it doesn't just change the lives of people who lived around it before, or who worked around it before, you find that actually it changes the way that people plan their lives. So now not only does someone who lived in Harlow when it was opened have the opportunity to work somewhere else, but someone say who works say in Heathrow can buy a house on the other side of London."
10. A place of romance. In 1991 Chris and Sue Glazier held their wedding reception in a service station on the M25. The couple won a prize on a local radio station - a paid-for mystery wedding. "All we knew on the night before was that we'd been travelling at 50mph on our wedding night," says Sue. "We thought Orient Express perhaps, very romantic." They actually spent their wedding night on a coach going round the M25, although it did have a four-poster bed in it. How was the night? "Bumpy," says Sue.
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The Belladrum Tartan Heart Festival is to host an additional night's entertainment next year.
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Bella near Beauly has been a two-day event with acts performing on a Friday and Saturday.
But organiser Joe Gibbs said because so many revellers arrive at the campsite on the Thursday, a headline performance would be put on that day next year.
The festival, which was headlined this year by Sir Tom Jones and Frightened Rabbit, will take place on 6-8 August.
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"It's a grower," said Sam Smith.
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By Amelia ButterlyNewsbeat reporter
"It takes a few listens," he explained, before you can fully appreciate Writing's on the Wall, the theme for the new James Bond film, Spectre.
It got its first radio play this morning and #writingsonthewall and Bond immediately started trending on social media. Looking at the reaction, it's fair to say Sam has divided opinion.
There seems to be as many people saying the track is "amazing" as there are calling it "astoundingly dull".
Listen to Sam Smith's Writing's On The Wall here
Stacy Redmond tweeted: "@samsmithworld the bond theme is fabulous. Well done, gave me goosebumps."
Jonny Mann tweeted: "It took Sam Smith to write the new James Bond song in 20 minutes. You can tell."
Radio 1 Breakfast Show host Nick Grimshaw spoke to the singer before the track debuted on air and Sam said he was nervous.
"Its very scary. I just hope everyone likes it," he said.
Grimmy tweeted: "VERY Bond-y well done @samsmithworld it's epic! *shoots a baddie* *gets off with bird*"
When the pair spoke previously, Sam revealed he wrote Writing's on the Wall in just 20 minutes.
"I wasn't feeling pressure at the time... Now I'm scared," he said this time.
A Bond theme song has yet to make it to number one in the UK charts.
"This song isn't a big pop song. It's a classic Bond song," said Sam.
"I don't think it's a number one friendly song. I'm not looking for that. I just want to do it justice."
Neave tweeted: "Sam Smith could've made such a good Bond theme but instead it's really bad."
Paddy tweeted: "The new Sam Smith Bond track is incredible."
"People have been saying that it reminds them of Goldfinger," said Sam. That track was sung by Shirley Bassey back in 1964.
"The orchestration is unbelievable. I never head anything like it on one of my songs before," said Sam.
And Radio 1 tweeted this: "Bond vs Earth Song. You made us do this. Sorry Sam."
Follow @BBCNewsbeat on Twitter, BBCNewsbeat on Instagram, Radio1Newsbeat on YouTube and you can now follow BBC_Newsbeat on Snapchat
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By Andy McFarlaneBBC News
Call to retired medics
It was mooted some time ago and now there's confirmation: retired doctors and nurses will be asked to return to the NHS to help the service cope with the coronavirus outbreak. "Lend us your expertise... you can help to save lives," is the pitch from Ruth May, chief nursing officer for England. The Nursing and Midwifery Council is writing to 50,000 nurses across the UK whose registration lapsed in the last three years, while the General Medical Council will contact 15,500 recently retired doctors. It comes as the government reveals which key workers will be allowed to send their children to school, after the education system closes today.
Health Secretary Matt Hancock says protective personal equipment is being rushed to frontline NHS staff and social care providers, following concern workers were being put at risk by shortages. He's also pledged to ensure all hospitals have enough ventilators, revealing 1,400 companies - including Formula 1 racing teams - have pledged to switch operations to supply them.
Jobs and unity
After talks with unions and business groups, the chancellor is set to announce an employment and wage subsidy package to try to protect millions of jobs. It comes as the Queen urges unity in a message to the nation. "At times such as these, I am reminded that our nation's history has been forged by people and communities coming together to work as one, concentrating our combined efforts with a focus on the common goal," her statement says.
Wondering how long this effort might have to last? While the prime minister suggests the UK might "turn the tide" on the virus within 12 weeks, our health correspondent James Gallagher finds no clear answer - or definite exit strategy - from the science community.
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Keep up to date
You can get an idea of the global picture via our visual guide and stay in touch with the latest developments at home and abroad via our live page.
This weekend...
Families might not be able to spend Mothering Sunday in mum's favourite restaurant but plenty are thinking up different ways to mark the occasion, as Kirstie Brewer reports. If you're wondering how to get the R and R - and fun - you need while observing social distancing, you might be inspired by our feature on the ways friends, pub quiz teams and even Brownies are spending time together online. And for those pining for the football, Newsbeat has details of an online charity FIFA 20 tournament - with stars from top clubs due to pick up video game controllers on Sunday.
Still not clear on what social distancing involves? Watch this video explainer to find out. It's one of many on our dedicated coronavirus index, where you can also remind yourself of the symptoms and how to stay safe.
Robots use light beams to zap hospital viruses
By Adrienne Murray, technology of business reporter, BBC News
"Please leave the room, close the door and start a disinfection," says a voice from the robot. "It says it in Chinese as well now," Simon Ellison, vice president of UVD Robots, tells me as he demonstrates the machine.
Through a glass window we watch as the self-driving machine navigates a mock-hospital room, where it kills microbes with a zap of ultraviolet light. "We had been growing the business at quite a high pace - but the coronavirus has kind of rocketed the demand," says chief executive, Per Juul Nielsen.
Read the full article
One thing not to miss today...
Lessons from Italy's 'red zone'
Listen up
The latest edition of the Coronavirus Newscast dissects the latest government advice on social distancing, namely: "Stop going to the pub!" Meanwhile, with all sorts of businesses - bars included - facing up to losing their customers, HARDtalk's Stephen Sackur asks Laurence Boone, chief economist at the global economic forum, the OECD, if enough is being done to prevent a recession.
What the papers say
Two statements dominate the front pages. Prime Minister Boris Johnson's suggestion the UK can "turn the tide" on coronavirus within 12 weeks is widely quoted in headlines. Most papers also feature what the Daily Mail calls the Queen's "Blitz spirit" message of unity to the nation. Meanwhile, the Financial Times and Daily Telegraph lead on the expected announcement from Chancellor Rishi Sunak of a plan to help British companies keep paying staff during the outbreak. Meanwhile, the prime minister comes under scrutiny in the Daily Star. It pictures a "lorry-load" of luxury loo roll being dropped off at Downing Street.
From elsewhere
A message from Italy: it's going to get worse. Much worse. (Slate)
'Everything is on hold': how coronavirus turned our lives upside down (HuffPost UK)
Daily chart: How long can the novel coronavirus survive on surfaces and in the air? (Economist)
Mother's Day: what people can and can't do to celebrate with their mums during coronavirus (Telegraph)
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Need a little light relief?
There's not been a lot of cheer in the news lately. If you need a diversion, watch this fascinating glimpse of the way children's TV looks in North Korea. Or hear Dr Radha Modgil - of Radio 1's Life Hacks fame - explain why it's so hard to stick to new habits. It's Friday, which means it's time to test your current affairs knowledge in our quiz of the week's news. Or, if you just want to do something really silly, see if you can tell a "clong, bong, doying" from a "wallop, clang, jangle" in a BBC Archive quiz based on its stock of 16,000 sound effects.
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Star snowboarder Chloe Kim's lightning moves won her Olympic gold on Tuesday , while her Twitter call-out for ice cream and admission of 'hanger' (angry when hungry) won her thousands of hearts on social media.
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By Georgina RannardBBC News
"I hate crying but I'll give myself a pass for this one," Kim tweeted to her large fan base after winning gold in the women's halfpipe. Her dad called her win his "American dream".
The teenager's name was the most searched on Naver, South Korea's largest portal, as many swelled with pride at her performance. Kim's parents are South Koreans who emigrated to the United States in 1982.
But some social media users in the country are keenly imagining alternative lives for the unstoppable 17-year-old Californian, asking could she have achieved gold if she'd been born in South Korea?
"If she grew up in South Korea, she would be stuck on the bus going to academies (hagwon) all day," one Naver used commented, referring to the country's culture of encouraging long hours of studying and suggesting she would not have had the opportunity to become an athlete.
Winter Olympics: Day-by-day guide
"If you were born in my country, you would be doing extra study at this hour. Envy you, American," another wrote.
Some suggested other careers for Kim, arguing that individual creativity is often stifled in South Korea.
You might also like:
"If she grew up in South Korea, she would just be a normal businesswoman," one user suggested, while another said "if she grew up in South Korea, she would be serving at a ski resort restaurant. Never become Korean. South Korea would bury your talent like a black-hole."
Others were sceptical of why fellow South Koreans were only interested in Kim now she's famous.
"Now they are trying to associate with these South Korean-Americans who they used to ignore. Why not just support them?" one wrote.
Another suggested that the outpouring of love was misguided: "Please don't say she is South Korean. She is part of the US national team."
But however dazzling Kim's charm, it could never win over absolutely everyone.
"Chloe will positively affect South Korea's reputation… But some are saying her fame is meaningless," one user wrote, adding "Do you really think winning a medal for South Korea is only thing that matters?"
There's always one.
Additional reporting by William Lee, BBC Korean service
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The coronavirus pandemic has dealt a hard blow to businesses around the world. In the US alone, economists project that more than 100,000 small businesses have permanently shut because of the health crisis. Among those are iconic institutions that have survived for decades. Stan's Donuts in Los Angeles is one of them.
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By Alice CuddyBBC News
Stan Berman says there are three reasons his doughnuts were so good.
The first was the sea air that blew into his shop from the Pacific Ocean some five miles away - he never used air conditioning, even at the height of the LA summer, to avoid spoiling the perfect atmospheric conditions.
The second reason was the skill that went into making the doughnuts. And the third, simply, was love.
Stan took over his shop in the heart of LA's bustling Westwood Village neighbourhood more than 55 years ago. The unassuming one-storey white-block building sits on the corner of two busy streets. Stan described it as "the smallest little shop you've ever seen".
It was prime real estate: less than two blocks away from the UCLA campus and opposite the Fox Bruin and Fox Village cinemas where glamorous premieres would frequently take place.
The exact date it all began is a matter of debate. He believes it was Christmas time 1963, while others in his family think it was 1964. What everyone can agree on is that it quickly made its mark.
When Stan first took over it was called The Corner Shoppe - a distributor for pastries, pies, cookies and "everything else like that". Everything, that is, apart from doughnuts.
Stan came from a long line of Jewish bread bakers. As a child, he would wake up before dawn to fry doughnuts at his father's little Philadelphia bakery, finishing them off with a generous coating of granulated sugar. When people came in to buy a loaf of bread in the morning, they'd pick up one of Stan's doughnuts too.
He later learned how to make intricate European-inspired pastries.
The Corner Shoppe had equipment for baking, but when Stan first took over it only sold other people's food.
Then fate stepped in.
One Sunday morning when the shop was closed, Stan popped in to clean up and, noticing the heavy footfall in the area, saw an opportunity. He called a friend in the bakery business who brought him flour, yeast and everything else he needed.
He made a piece of dough and fried a batch of doughnuts, then sold them through the shop's window.
It soon became a routine. Every Sunday, Stan would head into work at about 04:00 to make doughnuts; his wife would drive his three children down a few hours later to sell his creations; and with the money they made, the family would go out for dinner in the evening.
On Monday mornings people started coming in looking for doughnuts.
"They'd say 'Stan why aren't you making doughnuts?'" Stan, now 90, recalls. "And I'd say 'Well you know, we're not really doing that'. Then, before you know it, we were doing that."
The Corner Shoppe became The Corner Donut Shoppe and eventually Stan's Donuts.
Doughnuts were considered at the low-end of the bakery business, but Stan applied the techniques for making fine pastries learned in his youth to create a new product.
"They were so different from most doughnuts, even though I used the same flour, and shortenings and toppings," he says.
"My idea was I'm going to make something you really like. Tell me what you like and I'm going to try and make something for you as a doughnut so you will come in for yours - I did that for hundreds of people."
He packed his array of flavours - cherry, chocolate, cinnamon, peanut butter - into a display case that "blasted" people when they walked into the tiny room.
Before long, Stan was selling thousands of doughnuts every day.
His growing reputation and proximity to the two LA cinemas meant some of Hollywood's biggest stars were among his customers.
When one of her movies was playing across the road, actress Ali MacGraw and her partner Steve McQueen would frequently drive up to Stan's shop on a motorcycle, get a cup of coffee and a doughnut and sit outside on the kerb to watch people going into the cinema.
Elizabeth Taylor - one of Hollywood's most glamorous women - ordered coffee and doughnuts with a group of friends. Not that Stan recognised her - a passer-by pointed her out.
Willy Wonka actor Gene Wilder and Hollywood filmmaker Mel Brooks were also regulars. But Stan had one rule: he never took photos of the stars coming into his shop.
"I wanted them to be comfortable to come in and share my doughnuts," he says.
Cementing its place in Hollywood history, the shop's original signage was restored for a scene in Quentin Tarantino's 2019 film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
In more recent years, Stan's Donuts has been frequented by a Nobel laureate and senior staff at the nearby UCLA - as well as many students.
"For generations, numerous UCLA departments have shared boxes of Stan's Donuts to celebrate special occasions, myriad student groups have sold them as fundraisers for worthy causes, and so many on our campus have had their days brightened by one (or more) of your delicious treats," the chancellor of the university, Gene Block, said in a recent letter to Stan.
When the animated show The Simpsons turned 20, producers ordered batches of Stan's Homer Simpson doughnuts - pink frosting, sprinkles - for Fox affiliates.
Simpsons writer Carolyn Omine tweeted that the shop was among her first memories of LA. Stan's cherry cheesecake doughnut was her favourite.
While the doughnuts themselves might have been the biggest reason for the shop's success, Stan also became a star in his own right, and he revelled in the attention.
"We would bump into people all over the world, people who knew us from the doughnut shop," he recalls with glee. "We couldn't go to a movie, we couldn't go anywhere where someone wouldn't tap me on the shoulder and say 'Hey Stan'."
His shop's success and longevity earned it iconic status in LA. The city declared 3 May 2014 "Stan's Donuts Day", and the shop was named a "Monumental Business".
Looking back, Stan says he has had "the most unbelievable life and it all came from the doughnut shop".
He believes part of his success was due to him always being "the finisher". Even in old age, he would go into the shop every day - he'd make the icing, clean the pots and sweep the floors.
He was a perfectionist and expected the same attention to detail from his small team of staff. His favourite doughnut was his raisin buttermilk bar because as soon as he took a bite he could tell whether the fryer had been cleaned.
It was also the doughnut he'd give away to customers after a friendly chat at his shop. He gave away plenty over the years - he could never bear to throw any away at the end of the day.
But as well as being responsible for his successes, he says there were "one or two events" in his life where his shop caused problems.
Stan's first employee was a close friend called Norman. Together they were known as "the doughnut men". But the pair fell out when Stan missed Norman's wife's funeral because he was making doughnuts. They were never able to reconcile.
"The problem was that the shop was so important to me that I couldn't see other things around," Stan says.
Stan was still frying doughnuts into his 80s, but he had a stroke about three years ago and was forced to take a step back from his business, going to the shop once a week with his son. Without Stan there every day, sales were not what they used to be.
Despite the struggles, Stan hoped that he would still have the business when he turned 100. But he couldn't have anticipated the coronavirus pandemic, or the impact it would have on his little shop in LA.
Restaurants in the city were ordered to close in mid-March in a bid to slow the spread of the virus, with only takeaways and deliveries allowed. UCLA moved its classes online. Sales dropped dramatically.
Since 2014, Stan has been making money in royalties from Stan's Donuts & Coffee - a successful line of shops in Chicago with a range of doughnuts inspired by his Westwood creations. But that money has dried up in recent months, with business there also suffering under the pandemic.
With so much uncertainty about the virus, Stan and his family worried how long it would go on for.
"We did a bit of business, maybe 40%, but 40% didn't pay the labour," Stan says.
His daughter Pam says coronavirus "killed the business".
"We had to make the choice of whether to stay open by going into my father's savings and it wasn't worth it," she explains. Without the pandemic "we would have continued. The store would have stayed open until my father passed away."
For Pam it has left a "sweet and sour feeling".
"It was so much aggravation trying to run the store without my father there - that's what made it a bit easier to close the doors. But it's been very sad."
With a stay-at-home order in place in LA, there was no party to bid farewell to the shop when it closed its doors in April.
Stan has been left to settle reluctantly into retirement, while trying to come to terms with losing the two loves of his life - his doughnut shop and his wife of 68 years, Ina, who passed away in January.
He has received scores of letters from people mourning the loss of the shop and celebrating their memories there. He likens it to witnessing his own obituary.
His grandson, who has a tattoo of the shop's logo, took the equipment and is now learning to make doughnuts himself.
"It's not going to be Stan's Donuts but he wants to continue my father's legacy with making and selling doughnuts. That's what he's hoping to do," Pam says.
At the Westwood Village shop, a note announcing its closure remains stuck to a window - a quiet end to a business loved by so many.
"I hope that you will remember how our donuts made you smile for many years to come," it says.
The note ends: "With Love, Stan Berman."
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Counter-terror police have arrested four men on suspicion of being members of a banned organisation hours after they flew into the country.
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The four Sri Lankan nationals arrived at Luton Airport on 10 April and were arrested by police the next day.
The Metropolitan Police said the men were stopped under the Terrorism Act 2000 and arrested under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984.
The four remain in custody at a police station in Bedfordshire.
Membership of a proscribed organisation is contrary to section 11 of the Terrorism Act 2000.
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Imagine being told that you have a life-threatening illness. Imagine having to relearn how to carry out previously straightforward tasks such as using a public toilet. Imagine not only having to come to terms with all of this but also facing hostility because you have a hidden disability.
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Natalie Toper from London knows all about this.
Three years ago, just before her 32nd birthday, Natalie was diagnosed with late-stage bowel and rectal cancer.
She was told she would need an ileostomy, an operation involving the small intestine being diverted through an opening - or stoma - in the abdomen. A bag is then placed over the stoma to collect liquid and waste.
The procedure can either be temporary or permanent.
Before she even met the stoma nurses who would provide support, she was simply handed a stoma bag sample and told she would need to wear one permanently, for the rest her life.
She had her operation in May 2014 - a date she commemorates each year with what she terms a "stomaversary" card.
Deciding to do her own research, Natalie was horrified, disgusted and angry.
"I felt like I was being punished for a crime I didn't know I had committed," she recalls. "But the choices were, 'Have a stoma and live or don't have one and die, and die quickly.'"
Natalie opted for the former but discovered some new challenges, such as travelling on crowded public transport, especially when trying to get a disabled seat.
Another is the need to carry around a large amount of sanitary equipment when out and about. As well as a stoma ring, which protects the skin, and a bag, the kit may include medical grade wipes, skin protector and a rubbish bag.
Finding somewhere hygienic to change is often a major problem.
The mother of one says she often faces hostility when trying to use public disabled toilets.
Natalie explains: "Each and every time I have been met with verbal and physical abuse by both the able-bodied and visibly disabled communities, for trying to access facilities I am fully entitled to use."
This has ranged from being manhandled to being rammed by disability-scooter users.
She continues: "Every stomite [a person who wears a stoma] I have spoken to has experienced similar situations to myself. One of my friends even stopped going out because of the abuse."
Natalie tries to get around this problem by drinking less and making sure she has put on a clean bag before going out.
However, the most difficult challenge to deal with is dating as Natalie never knows how or when to say she has a stoma.
"If I am upfront and say I have a stoma at the beginning of a relationship, and explain what one actually is, men will turn their noses up and walk away," she says.
"If I wait a while, I get accused of taking the decision to date someone like me away from them, and again they walk."
In a bid to change attitudes, Natalie has started a petition for stoma signs to be added on to disabled toilets.
Conditions are starting to improve slowly. An example is the supermarket Sainsbury's promising to make its toilets more inclusive for their customers with stomas.
Natalie says she fears if she doesn't campaign on the issue, no-one else will.
By Bernadette McCague, UGC and Social News team
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Insecurity dominates the lives of millions of Mexicans. Caught between the murderous drug cartels and absent or corrupt law enforcement, communities are taking the law into their own hands. In the state of Guerrero, a fledgling vigilante force has grown into an organisation numbering thousands.
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By Linda PresslyBBC News, Ayutla
In the market town of Ayutla on a sweltering afternoon, two rusty old saloon cars pull up outside a furniture store on a street corner. Men with their rifles pointing skyward tumble out of the vehicles.
But one of them has no gun. Nor does he have any shoes. He is being detained, and is brought in roughly by the men with weapons - all volunteer members of Ayutla's self-defence force.
This street corner is the group's makeshift, unofficial headquarters. There are a few old chairs, a table, a barrel and some sandbags. Behind them, wardrobes embossed with Disney princesses jostle with chests of drawers. The young man with no shoes has his hands tied behind his back with nylon rope, and is told to sit down.
"We're not going to mistreat him, or be aggressive with him", explains Leonides Ramos Ortiz, a member of the self-defence force. "We're going to take care of him until the investigation begins."
Since they became a force to be reckoned with earlier this year, this is just one of dozens of arrests made by untrained, armed civilians from Ayutla and its surrounding pueblos. But they have no legal authority, and they should not be carrying their guns in the street.
This does not seem to be of concern to the steady stream of locals who come to the HQ to report crime. Dona Juana, a frail elderly woman, is having problems with a neighbour. He is trying to steal her land.
"He says he's going to tie my husband up and drag him behind a horse, he's going to kill me, and kidnap my daughter", she says.
Dona Juana has been to the police, the local council and the public affairs ministry, and nothing has been done.
Her friend, Carmela, believes Dona Juana's only hope is the "community police" as she calls the self-defence force.
"The regular police and the military are all being used by organised criminal groups to carry out their activities. They're not stopping crime. Now we have our own community police, everything is much quieter. In the last couple of months organised crime has begun to disappear."
Guerrero is what is called a hot state. It has some of the most violently disputed territory in Mexico, and produces more than half the country's heroin.
Drug cartels grow opium poppies and marijuana in the highlands of the Sierra Madre, and move cocaine towards the United States along the state's mountain passes. Acapulco on the Pacific coast is the Mexican city with the highest homicide rate.
And murder is a regular occurrence in Ayutla. On the outskirts of the town, down a rough track, a cavalcade of armoured military vehicles and police pick-up trucks have come to a stop next to a small farm.
Around the perimeter of the property, members of the self-defence force have taken up positions at five-metre intervals. Yellow police tape cordons off one area.
"They found the remains of a body here, in an unmarked grave. It looks like it's a drug-related crime", says Gonzalo Torres, a large middle-aged man in a checked shirt, and one of the vigilantes.
"Local people told us about the body, and we gave that information to the police." This is a role the self-defence force would like to play - important intermediaries between the community and Mexican authorities that are often regarded with suspicion by locals.
The next day another three bodies are found close by. One of them was buried crouching, a young man with his legs tucked under his chin.
Kidnap, too, is a common crime in Ayutla, a profitable sideline for the drug cartels and organised crime. Everyone knows someone who has been taken.
In January, when the third of their commanders in as many months was bundled into a vehicle by an armed gang, hundreds of men, and some women, joined the self-defence force. They swooped and detained more than 50 people they claimed were guilty of serious crime.
Eleuterio Maximino Flora was the first vigilante commander to be abducted. He did not think he would get away alive.
"They said they were going to kill me. They kicked me, and used torture. They nearly drowned me."
He says he did not know the men who held him. But he does know why he was taken.
"We had detained some criminals. So the gang kidnapped me to use as a bargaining chip to get their people released. I was freed after Comandante Ernesto Gallardo Grande told them if they executed me he was going to kill 10 members of one of their families."
But in this scary scenario, who were the bad guys? It is an illustration of what can happen when organised crime, an armed population and a power vacuum conspire to create an altogether toxic mix.
And there are allegations of torture against the self-defence force too. Rafael Mendoza Ventura is a lawyer representing some of those who were detained by the vigilantes in January, and who are now in the custody of the state while they are being investigated.
"While they were held by the self-defence force, electric shocks were applied to genitals, there were beatings, plastic bags put over detainees' heads - the same kind of practices the police use to extract confessions."
Comandante Ernesto Gallardo Grande denies these allegations.
Citizens' self-defence groups are now operating in 13 Mexican states. According to one newspaper, Reforma, they are present in more than 60 municipalities. But there are wider concerns about the growth of the vigilante movement in Mexico.
Luz Paula Parra is a security expert at CIDE, Centro de Investigacion y Docencia Economicas in Mexico City, and believes the state must take action to stop it.
"In Ayutla, it's very dangerous, a very short-term gain to allow these groups because they will be Frankensteins. Little by little they will gain power and resources, and then it won't be easy to stop them."
She points to examples elsewhere in Latin America, like Colombia, where self-defence groups morphed into paramilitary killing machines during the civil war.
And what of the shoeless young man detained in Ayutla, tied up and investigated? Even though the self-defence force found him guilty of violence against his wife, he was not handed over to the police.
Instead he was put to work sweeping streets and painting houses - part of a system of punishment and rehabilitation with its roots in indigenous culture, passed down from Mexico's original inhabitants.
At the end of last month, in their largest show of force so far, more than 1,500 of Ayutla's self-defence volunteers surrounded the community of Tierra Colorada. They demanded the police arrest several officials after one of their volunteers was murdered.
This is a movement that is growing in confidence. The risk is that it becomes yet another unaccountable, organised, armed group - one that threatens rather than enhances the security of the citizens of Ayutla.
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A US based media watchdog has called upon the Sri Lankan government to investigate attacks on the Tamil-language newspaper Sudar Oli including the killing of a printing press security guard and assaults on reporters.
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Condemning the spate of attacks on the Colombo based newspaper Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) recalls that Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapakse last week condemned the killing as an assault on freedom of expression.
Calling the attacks "vicious" CPJ Executive Director Ann Cooper said "the government has a responsibility to ensure the safety of journalists whose lives are increasingly endangered by political violence."
Four attacks
On August 29, two men lobbed grenades into the building housing the printing press, killing a guard and injuring two other staff members.
On August 21 two grenades were tossed into the paper's advertising office but failed to explode.
On August 30 two parliamentary reporters V. Puththirasigamani and Arumugam Varatharajah were assaulted while they waited for a bus, according to the Colombo-based Free Media Movement (FMM) and international news reports.
One was seriously injured.
Photo journalist Yathurshan Premachchandran was set upon and robbed on August 23 while covering a rally of the Jantha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) in front of a large crowd including local and international journalists.
Newsreader killed
JVP activists turned the photographer over to the police accusing him of being an LTTE member.
He was released the next day.
A senior Tamil broadcaster and her husband were earleir shot dead by suspected Tamil Tigers in the capital, Colombo.
Relangi Selvarajah, 44, a well-known newsreader worked for government owned Sri Lanka Rupavahini Corporarion, and her husband were gunned down around 1300 SLT on 12 August.
Military spokesman Brigadier Daya Ratnayake said the couple, Sinnathurai Selvarajah and his wife were in their shop when armed assailants shot them dead.
Sinnaturai Selvarajah, who has been an activist of the Peoples Liberation Organisation for Tamil Ealam (PLOTE), has left the organisation in 1990 and started his own business in the capital.
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London's Leicester Square is home to some of the UK's oldest and most beautiful cinemas - but unlike the equally famous West End theatres nearby, none have listed building status. Now, with developers circling, many are worried how long these buildings will last.
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By Duncan SmithBBC News
The 1930s Odeon West End, one of Leicester Square's oldest picture houses, has already been approved for demolition despite being in a conservation area and opposition from English Heritage.
There is nothing to stop others going the same way. Supporters fear they face a losing struggle to protect the most important cinemas in an area of central London hungry for ambitious new developments.
"Cinemas should be protected - they are a hugely important part of the history of our 20th Century towns and cities," says Henrietta Billings, senior conservation adviser at the Twentieth Century Society.
"Not only do they chart an interesting period of public entertainment - from their heyday as American Hollywood movie palaces, to slow decline in the post war years with competition from television - these enormous buildings were often fantastically elaborate 'Cathedrals of the Movies'."
But why is the design of these buildings so important?
Turn the clock back 70 years and many of the ambitious new developments were cinemas themselves.
Great cathedrals for the silver screen were rising across the city, some of the most imaginative auditoriums ever seen, bringing the glamour of Hollywood to central London, as well as less glamorous areas of the capital and the rest of the UK.
Gigantic and palatial auditoriums fit for Hollywood royalty themselves boasted the biggest screens ever seen; rows of velvet seats, palm trees and awe inspiring interiors ranged from Egyptian-inspired art deco to gothic-influenced design.
"The cinemas were designed to take people into a kind of fantasy land," explained Richard Gray, chairman of the Cinema Theatre Association, a heritage group. "It was joining with the fantasy of the film that you were about to see.
"I think the idea was to gobsmack the audience, in one way or another. Each cinema outdid the last one with a sensationalist interior."
Leicester Square's cinema history
So why do cinemas seem particularly vulnerable to the demolition ball now?
Unlike their architectural cousins, the West End theatres, many cinemas lost their original features in the race to keep up with technology.
First, in the 1950s, came the demand for massive curving CinemaScope screens. Then dawned the era of the multiplex. Picture houses that once housed one big screen and a thousand seats were carved-up to accommodate three or more small screens.
Such changes were introduced sympathetically in some venues - as in the now Grade II* listed Odeon in Muswell Hill, north London, where most of the original auditoriums' features have been retained.
At other times the alterations were more brutal, leaving little evidence of the cinema's glamorous past.
For instance, the space that in 1967 housed Europe's biggest CinemasScope screen at Odeon Marble Arch is now filled with five smaller screens.
Even one of London's most famous cinemas, the Empire Leicester Square, has succumbed to the most recent demands and installed an IMAX screen.
The cinema, which was for more than 50 years the biggest auditorium on the square, was subdivided to accommodate the new screen. Changes like that make it difficult for a cinema to ever be granted listed status.
Justin Ribbons, chief executive of Empire Cinemas, defended the changes made to the 130-year-old building.
"With each regeneration there is obviously a balance between maintaining the historic building and installing the new technology and imperative film marketing," he said.
"However, I think Empire Leicester Square is one of the best examples in London of sustaining both.
"You can't preserve the old building in its entire original form and purpose without it becoming irrelevant to today's entertainment industry. For us the building is tantamount with the business, and from that point of view we will always cherish and preserve as much of the building as we can."
English Heritage said it opposed the application to demolish the Odeon West End but explained that both the Empire and Odeon Leicester Square had been too significantly altered to be listed.
"The concentration of both cinemas and theatres in the West End is something we naturally take into account, but we nevertheless have to judge each building on its own merits," a spokesman said.
But despite the building's failure to meet English Heritage's standards, the Odeon Leicester Square (not to be confused with the Odeon West End, also in Leicester Square) is the biggest single screen cinema left in the UK, and remains a favourite among cinema aficionados.
With its famous black marble tower, it remains a valuable piece of the city's heritage and one of the most impressive places to see a film in London, according to Mr Gray.
"It has been emasculated and emaciated, compared to what it was... it did have this world class interior which was smashed to bits in the 1960s, but you still feel as though you are somewhere quite special," he said.
Cinemas at risk
Source: Cinema Theatre Association
Duncan Reynolds, the managing director of Odeon UK, points to the recent refurbishment of the Odeon in Swiss Cottage, north London, as evidence of a commitment to preserving the best of the past.
While the bulldozers may seem to be circling in the heart of London, elsewhere in the country there are a growing number of successful restoration projects.
The Rex in Berkhamstead and the Odyssey in St Albans, both in Hertfordshire, and the Regal in Evesham, Worcestershire, were all saved from the shadow of the developer's digger to become thriving cinemas in fully restored art deco glory.
In Stepney, east-London, the gigantic Troxy - a 1933 cinema and once a Mecca bingo hall - is now open again as an entertainment venue with occasional film presentations.
Daniel Smith, business development manager at the Troxy, explained the enduring appeal of this elegant old cinema.
"The 1930s was a very glamorous era where the environment that people were going to enjoy entertainment was just as important as the activity, and Troxy is a prime example of this," he said.
"Fragrances used to be pumped into the venue through the ceiling ducts to keep the space smelling fresh and the stunning original 1930s art deco architecture speaks for itself."
So while cinemas in Leicester Square may face an uncertain future, with a bit of imagination others have proved there's still life in the old picture palaces yet.
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Three people have pleaded not guilty to modern slavery charges.
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Robert Zaludek and Katarina Zaludekova, both 32, were charged with three counts of requiring a person to perform forced or compulsory labour.
The defendants and Helena Zaludekova, 50, are also charged with arranging or facilitating travel of another person with a view to being exploited.
They also denied theft charges and will face trial with five others who face theft and money laundering charges.
The eight people were arrested following an investigation by Staffordshire Police and appeared at Stoke-on-Trent Crown Court on Thursday to deny all charges.
The force said Mr Zaludek and Ms Zaludekova, both of Garnet Street, Stoke-on-Trent, were each charged in March with five counts of theft.
Helena Zaludekova, of Cauldon Road, Stoke-on-Trent, faces two counts of theft.
A fourth man, Bartolomej Zaludek, 52, of Cauldon Road, Stoke-on-Trent, was charged with two counts of theft.
Emelia Simonokova, 23, of Victoria Road, Fenton, Rene Zaludek, 23, also of Victoria Road, Fenton, and Jan Pokuta, 32, of Harcourt Street, Shelton, were all charged with money laundering.
A 17-year-old man from Stoke-on-Trent, who has not been identified because of his age was charged with theft.
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Aberdeen FC's move to a new stadium has moved a step closer with the announcement that several offers have been received for Pittodrie.
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The ground was put on the market after outline planning permission for 350 homes on the site was secured.
The club says the sale of the 13.7-acre Pittodrie site is key to securing the £38m needed to build a new stadium, capable of holding about 21,000 fans.
Consultants CBRE say they are now in discussions with several bidders.
The new stadium would be at Loirston Loch on the southern outskirts of the city.
It is hoped the stadium - which is planned to be an iconic landmark - could be ready for the 2013/14 season.
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UK gas producer BG Group has signed a deal worth about £300m with Wood Group PSN and Stork Technical Services for North Sea work.
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The deal is for a range of specialist support over the next five years.
This will be centred on BG Group's Armada, Everest and Lomond assets.
Meanwhile, Chevron North Sea has awarded a £150m contract to Dolphin Drilling for North Sea work. The drilling program is expected to start in 2015.
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Abduction, forced return, torture and a campaign of intimidation. On Thursday the damning allegations made against the billionaire ruler of Dubai, Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al-Maktoum, by his former wife, Princess Haya Bint Al-Hussain, became established fact, published in a series of judgements by the High Court in London.
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By Frank GardnerBBC security correspondent, at the High Court
Following a high-profile case that began eight months ago, the court has published a Fact Finding Judgement (FFJ) in favour of Princess Haya who fled Dubai last year, along with her two children, telling friends she was in fear of her life.
Sheikh Mohammed had tried, unsuccessfully, to keep the judgement out of the public domain but his appeal was rejected after the case was ruled to be in the public interest. The ruler of Dubai was found to have "not been open and honest with the court".
In a statement issued after the judgements were published, Sheikh Mohammed said: "As a head of government, I was not able to participate in the court's fact-finding process. This has resulted in the release of a 'fact-finding' judgment which inevitably only tells one side of the story."
He insisted the case was a private matter. "I ask that the media respect the privacy of our children and do not intrude into their lives in the UK," he said.
'Young women deprived of liberty'
After hearing extensive witness statements over a period of time, the court found Sheikh Mohammed to have been responsible for the abduction and forced return of two of his daughters from another marriage.
The judge found that Sheikh Mohammed "continues to maintain a regime whereby both these two young women are deprived of their liberty".
Princess Haya of Jordan, 45, a daughter of the late King Hussain and a former Olympic equestrian, married Sheikh Mohammed of Dubai, 70, in 2004, becoming the sixth and youngest of his wives. They have two children, aged seven and 11.
Initially she believed his explanations of what had happened to the two princesses, namely that they had been "rescued" and were now safe with the family.
But by early 2019 Princess Haya had become suspicious and voiced her concerns. She had also begun an adulterous affair with her British bodyguard.
A campaign of intimidation by Sheikh Mohammed's agents began and the court heard that a gun was twice placed on her pillow with the safety catch off. A helicopter landed outside her house with a threat to remove her to a remote desert prison.
The judge ruled that "the father has therefore acted in a manner from the end of 2018 which has been aimed at intimidating and frightening the mother, and that he has encouraged others to do so on his behalf".
'A huge embarrassment'
In April 2019 Princess Haya fled to Britain, taking her two children with her. The court heard how veiled threats from Sheikh Mohammed had left her terrified for her own safety, as well as fears that her children could be abducted and forcibly returned to Dubai.
In May 2019 she said he told her: "You and the children will never be safe in England". He published a poem entitled: "You lived, you died".
The court heard how the Sheikh had used his media contacts to generate a series of negative articles about Princess Haya, many of which were "wholly inaccurate".
These judgements, and the allegations upheld by them, are clearly a huge personal embarrassment to Sheikh Mohammed Al-Maktoum. It is hardly surprising therefore that his legal team tried their best to keep them out of the public domain.
In his latest statement, he said: "The appeal was made to protect the best interests and welfare of the children. The outcome does not protect my children from media attention in the way that other children in family proceedings in the UK are protected."
While his former wife, Princess Haya, has a relatively low profile, Sheikh Mohammed is a global figure in the horseracing world where he is the owner and founder of Godolphin Stables.
He has often been photographed with the Queen. He is also a renowned figure across the Middle East, responsible for transforming the emirate of Dubai into the massive tourism, leisure and business destination it has become.
The rulings have been welcomed by human rights campaigners.
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Fancy a bank account with $300,000 (£184,000) in it? If you know where to look and you don't mind dealing with cybercriminals then the going rate is just $300, a study of the hacking underworld suggests.
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By Paul RubensTechnology reporter
For that you'll get the bank account details, plus online username and password providing you with full access to the money.
For criminal buyers that price is a steal compared with the sums they were paying as little as two years ago. Back in 2011 the most they could have expected to acquire for $300 would have been a compromised bank account with just $7,000 in it, and probably less, the researchers say,
The investigation was carried out by Joe Stewart, director of malware research at Dell SecureWorks, and David Shear, an independent researcher.
The pair have monitored Russian and other criminal forums on the internet in which financial details are traded.
Mr Stewart says that the price of all sorts of stolen financial information has fallen sharply over the past year on hacker black markets, and suggests this is the result of some large scale data breaches that have occurred during the period.
The glut in supply could continue for some time.
"I think that there is a lot further for prices to fall," he says.
Secrets for sale
It's not just the price of online bank account credentials that has fallen, Mr Stewart adds.
For example, a full dossier of financial and other information about an individual that can be used to commit identity theft now costs just $25 for a US victim, or $30-40 for a British one.
Two years ago these full dossiers - known as Fullz in hacker speak - changed hands for as much as $60 each.
A typical Fullz contains a victim's:
And one or more from the following:
In fact, it now appears there is such a large supply of stolen credit card details that hackers have had to slash their prices and take even more extreme measures to sell them before they expire or are cancelled.
"Hackers used to steal credit card details one at a time, but now they have figured out where to steal large numbers of details in one go," Mr Stewart says.
"Sellers on these black markets will now usually give you a few credit card details for free so you can check them out, and then you can buy them in lots of about a thousand."
The going rate is about $4 per card for US Visa or Mastercard details, and $7-$8 for UK or European ones, he says.
Sophisticated scams
The reason that stolen US information is worth less than UK or European financial information is partly because it is harder and more costly for criminals to transfer stolen funds from the US to where they are - which is usually Eastern Europe or Asia, Mr Stewart says.
This usually involves using middlemen who take a cut to launder the money.
The Fullz packages have only been available for a few years, and their existence indicates that criminals are getting more sophisticated in their offerings, according to Mr Stewart.
"Previously they just offered lists of credit card numbers, but offering Fullz shows that hackers have got smarter and are now able to target places where a wide range of personal data is warehoused," he says.
Cybercriminals have also become more sophisticated in the way they offer stolen financial data to prospective customers.
This includes setting up websites with search facilities that allow them to search for stolen online details for specific banks.
"They set these up as subscription services, and subscribers can then run as many searches as they like for accounts at specific banks that they can get cash out from most conveniently," he says.
Not all prices are falling in the world of cybercrime world, however.
Computer hackers try to identify and then exploit vulnerabilities in programs and operating systems to gain access to credit card details and other data.
Bitcoin burglars
Stefan Frei, research director at security consultancy NSS Labs, says that the price that cybercriminals are willing to pay for newly discovered vulnerabilities is rising and the more secure a platform is perceived to be, the more the hack would be worth.
"People are putting more of their life on their computers, so the value to a hacker per computer is much higher than before," he explains.
"An iOS vulnerability may now change hands for $500,000 or even $1m."
Looking ahead, Mr Stewart believes the rise of Bitcoin - a virtual currency - could cause the thieves to change focus. Businesses are attracted to supporting the innovation as an alternative to cash because it is cheap to use, payments are almost instant, and the move gains them publicity.
But the Dell researcher warns that digital wallets - the computer programs used to store bitcoins - make more tempting targets for hackers than real bank accounts.
"Many Bitcoin users don't know much about security, and many protect their digital wallets with a user name and password that criminals can get past easily using malware," he says.
"The beauty for a criminal is that if you steal a Bitcoin wallet you don't have to go through a middleman like you do with a real bank account to move the money. You can just cash it out instantly anywhere in the world."
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Lenin had it about right when he said: "There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks when decades happen."
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Amol RajanMedia editor@amolrajanon Twitter
In recent weeks, several decades' worth of disruption and, frankly, obliteration has come to the UK's newspapers and magazines. Indeed, it's hard to overstate the impact of coronavirus on the sector.
Many titles were beleaguered already, propped up by generous owners or operating under commercial models that simply can't withstand 21st Century reality. Some are going bust as you read this.
Much of what was going to happen in any case will now happen suddenly: publishing history is suddenly accelerated. The shift from print to digital at virtually all publications will be radically sped up. A lot of publishers are simply going to run out of cash. One regional publisher has being ringing up contractors asking if it can delay payments by three months at least.
This is the grim story that was only partially told by the publication on 16 April, of the latest figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABC). They only covered the period of 2 March to 22 March - and therefore do not show the full, devastating impact of the lockdown.
Print publications are dependent on printers being able to print; distributors being able to drive copies around the country; and shops and stalls being open for people to buy or pick up the publication. A national lockdown obliterates every part of that chain.
Moreover, much of the media is heavily reliant on advertising. In any economic downturn, advertising is one of the first things to go, being seen as a discretionary spend. The sharper the downturn, the sharper the drop in advertising spend. This looks a sharp downturn.
With distribution systems obliterated, and a major source of revenue not just jeopardised but frozen, while fixed costs such as rents and staffing still have to be paid, inevitably many publications will go bust because of this pandemic. Some have already.
Yesterday's news
City AM has stopped printing through the crisis. Playboy's Spring 2020 magazine will be its last as a regular print product. JPI Media, a regional publisher, stopped printing 12 titles, including the MK Citizen in Milton Keynes and the News Guardian in North Tyneside. The company has put 350 staff on furlough and cut the pay of remaining staff by up to 15%.
Kerrang!, the music magazine, announced that it will stop printing for three months. DIY magazine is not printing this month, but instead asking readers for support. Other publications, such as Loud and Quiet, are trying to innovate their way through, collaborating with other publishers and labels to generate support.
This week, The Jewish Chronicle collapsed. It will now be part of a merged operation with Jewish News.
My old local paper, the 150 year-old South London Press, has furloughed half its staff and is asking for reader donations to help get through this crisis. That's understandable but obviously won't build a sustainable business.
That Google, through its Google News Initiative, should have launched a global emergency relief fund for local news publishers just confirms the extraordinary state of affairs in news today: whether my parents and their neighbours in Tooting find out about, say, parking charges around their local common might depend on the benefaction of a Californian data company whose executives probably couldn't find Tooting on a map (unless they Googled it).
In horrible times like these, always think first of the staff: generally creative people who have lived with uncertainty for many years, providing a valuable public service, and often could have chosen a better-paid career.
Reach, the regional publisher that also prints the Express and Mirror titles, announced that 20% of its 4,700 staff - that's 940 - will be furloughed. Senior management will take a 20% pay cut; other staff will take a 10% pay cut.
While all publications have been hit, those that are most resilient, and least vulnerable to this carnage, are those that are part of a big group, have strong digital properties, and have successfully switched their business model to generate income directly from readers rather than through advertising.
It follows that those who are most vulnerable are those that are not part of major empires, are heavily reliant on advertising and print distribution, and don't have really powerful digital operations yet.
Despite its editorial strengths, City AM sadly ticks all of these boxes.
And to take the next two most glaring examples, for Metro and the Evening Standard, this has been a financial horror-show. The former has some security in being part of DMGT, at least. Both titles depend heavily on footfall: commuters rushing through busy stations and picking copies up for their journey to or from work.
Under its free-to-consumer model, the Evening Standard distributed tens of thousands of copies at major commuter hubs. Those are now desolate. Officially, the Standard has furloughed many staff, cut distribution to 500,000 copies, stopped producing ES magazine, and tried a home delivery service. Talk there, and among several senior executives across the industry that I have spoken to, is of "being nimble".
But nimbleness is what you need in a tight spot. It's no good if the ground beneath your feet disappears. When that happens, you need to find firmer or higher ground.
Metro has also been hammered. Remember: it's Britain's biggest newspaper. Or was.
I am told that circulation, which is usually around 1.5 million, has been cut to between 400,000 and 500,000 copies. That's perhaps two-thirds of its daily audience vanished in an instant. The vast majority of its copies had, historically, been distributed in London and the south-east. Now, London and the south-east account for about half of its distribution; and the rest of the country accounts for the remainder.
The rate charged to ad agencies varies according to market conditions and the relations with different groups; but at one stage in recent weeks, it was down by 70%. As an unforeseen hit to a business, that's horrific. For titles funded predominantly by advertising, a big cut to those rates has a direct and immediate impact on the bottom line.
In the present circumstances, retaining even 30% of advertising revenue is a heroic performance. But such is the hit on revenues that urgent cost-cutting will have to be looked at.
Metro has the enormous advantage of being part of a cash-rich company - DMGT - which is big enough and resilient enough to spread costs around for a while. Moreover, the paper has been profitable for several years. It has an underlying business model which, when normality returns, should allow it to move the bottom line from red to black.
Staff at the i newspaper can count themselves very lucky that their paper was bought by DMGT, from JPI Media, before this pandemic struck.
No title in Fleet Street will be unaffected. At News UK, where new editors were installed at The Sunday Times and The Sun, there were plans to create a seven-day operation across the Times titles, and also launch a radio station. National social distancing measures are not ideal preparation.
At the Telegraph titles, perennial questions about whether the daily and Sunday paper are for sale, amid a bizarre legal battle in the Barclay family, get no easier to answer. To date, one obstacle to any sale has been the price demanded by the Barclay twins, even as, in recent years, headline profits have tumbled.
Telegraph Media Group announced this week 90 non-editorial workers would be furloughed until the end of May. Remaining non-editorial staff would work a four-day week from 1 May, and their salaries would be cut by 20%.
What of The Guardian? A painful, effective turnaround strategy, executed in three years, has been undone in about three weeks. Revenues over the next six months will be £20m down. Plans were already afoot to cut £10m of spending. A hundred non-editorial staff will be furloughed. Guardian staff are of course in the hugely privileged position of being part of a charitable trust that has reserves in the bank, and exists to fund their journalism.
Meanwhile at the Financial Times, 20 non-editorial staff are on paid leave, top editors and managers are taking a 10% pay cut for 2020, the board is taking a 20% cut, and CEO John Ridding is taking a 30% cut. Pension contributions are being halved, and an annual bonus scheme suspended.
Changing behaviour
I have seen one major publisher's unaudited estimates for the circulation decline of major British newspapers since the lockdown was introduced. It suggests some paid-for papers are down by as much as 20% over the past fortnight. All papers have been seriously affected.
I am not reproducing those figures here because they are not audited. Trying to get an accurate figure for circulation declines in the lockdown is made very much harder by the fact that most of the places that provide information about sales and pick-up are currently shut.
Most papers are trying very hard to use this crisis to accelerate a shift in consumption to the digital sphere and - crucially - to get readers into the habit of paying for journalism online. The success of these efforts varies hugely from group to group.
Many big titles have a subscriber base that is used to home delivery. Through Herculean efforts, home delivery services are still largely working - and home delivery services have been drastically ramped up.
Moreover, all titles, not least the Daily Mail (which just won Newspaper of the Year) and The Sun (which is pushing a digital edition of the paper known as "the classic"), are using their papers to give a massive push to digital sign-ups. That is, they are trying to get readers into the habit of paying for digital - tablet, say - versions of their newspapers. From a commercial point of view, this is a much, much more attractive way of, in the jargon, monetising users.
Think of a single article - a page-lead, for example, on the situation in, say, Italy.
To get that article into a print publication, a sub-editor has to lay it out on a page on their computer. That page is then part of a package sent electronically to the printers. There, by a triumph of engineering that unites hot metal, clanging presses and pungent ink, thousands of copies are printed in bundles called "newspapers". Stacks of these are lifted by a human being into a van. Another human being drives that van to lots of retailers, which takes time and fuel. If you aren't living through a global pandemic, you might be inclined to go to a shop and buy this beautiful bundle, whereupon the retailer will take a cut.
Think of that same article being sold on the iPad version of, say, the Mail or Times. The sub-editor still has to lay it out on a page. But this is then sent, by a triumph of digital engineering, to all those subscribers who have signed up for an iPad edition. It's done instantly. No paper costs, no staffing costs at the presses, or ink costs, or health and safety and insurance costs; no van costs; no fuel costs; no cut going to the retailer. It happens super-fast, it's very cheap, it's a direct-to-consumer offer and - crucially - if you've logged in with your details, the company can know what you're up to, what you're interested in, and how long you dwell on particular pages.
To a publisher, getting the same journalism read on an iPad, say, or smartphone edition is hugely preferable. Over the past few weeks, there has been a huge marketing splurge within newspapers like the Mail and the Sun to shift readers to these navigable digital editions of the newspaper.
In that sense, Covid-19 is accelerating innovation that was long overdue and likely to happen anyway. Just as this health emergency has shone a cruel torchlight on the fault-lines in our society, so it has highlighted the ill-health of the newspaper and magazine business right now.
What's striking is that, while that business has been in crisis for well over a decade and a half, and in that time been through the global financial crisis and downturn that followed, many titles had still not done enough to prepare for the current emergency.
The fundamentals haven't changed; they've just been exposed. The market in local news is broken; there is no editorial solution to the commercial problems of publishing; the sooner you can make digital pay, the better; and revenue direct from readers will always, always be preferable to that from advertisers.
All that was as true in 2005 as it is in 2020. The difference is, for those who failed to adapt in time, it's now too late.
If you're interested in issues such as these, please follow me on Twitter or Facebook; and also please subscribe to The Media Show podcast from Radio 4.
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A single moment in Cairo 10 years ago made me think: "Wait, this is more than just another protest." It was a Friday, when the most important weekly congregational prayer for Muslims takes place, and it came a few days after the first demonstrations against Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak had started.
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By Jeremy BowenBBC Middle East editor
Mohamed ElBaradei, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for working to stop the spread of nuclear weapons, had emerged as critic of the regime. When he went to a mosque that Friday, everyone there expected trouble, even though Mr ElBaradei himself always urged peaceful protest. Hundreds of riot police were ready. Several thousand demonstrators were waiting.
I was a little cynical about opposition to the President. I had seen a few demonstrations in the years before that, of brave, generally middle class protestors, who would chant slogans for as long as it took for the police to arrest them, usually violently.
When the prayer ended that day, the demonstrators turned on the police.
The moment I realised it was different was when I saw it was not the educated middle class who were protesting but desperately poor Egyptian men. They turned over police vehicles, setting them alight and taking on clubs and tear gas. Revolutions have no strength without the urban poor.
It was a day of pitched street battles that culminated with crowds storming bridges across the Nile that led to Tahrir Square, the symbolic heart of the city.
When Hosni Mubarak fell, exactly 10 years ago, the news roared across the crowds in the square who had by then fought off his supporters for 18 days. During the night the noise of clashes in and around the square rose over the silence of the curfew imposed by the regime. On one bizarre and violent day there was even a cavalry charge against the protestors by men on camels.
The revolution had no real leaders, which made it feel popular and democratic. That was also its downfall. The young people who had become prominent in the protests could not find a way to organise themselves into an effective political force. It was understandable. Years of authoritarian rule meant they were starting from scratch.
A free presidential election in 2012 came down to a fight between the candidates fielded by Egypt's two organised groups. On one side was the Muslim Brotherhood who had been working since the 1920s for a state based on the laws of Islam. They believed their moment, finally, had come.
On the other was the Egyptian military, which had controlled Egypt since a group calling itself the Free Officers overthrew the monarch in 1952. Mubarak was a former air force chief, who was sacrificed by the armed forces to preserve their power, which in Egypt extends to the lucrative control of large sections of the economy.
The Muslim Brotherhood won the election, but governed badly and rapidly alienated Egyptians who were not their natural supporters. The military did all they could to undermine the government. As Egypt sank deeper into instability and violence, the generals seized power in 2013.
By the beginning of 2014 more than two thousand people, mostly civilians, are estimated to have been killed in political violence on the streets. I saw much of it: security forces levelling their weapons and directing deadly fire at a big and angry crowd outside the base where the deposed president, Mohammed Morsi, was being held; families trying to identify bodies laid out in a mosque and decomposing rapidly in the August heat after security forces killed at least 900 people as they broke up sit-ins by supporters of the Brotherhood; the dead from a huge demonstration in Ramses Square being sewn into burial shrouds at another mosque where the staircases were slippery with blood.
Since then the armed forces have consolidated their control of Egypt. Their leader, Field Marshal Abdul Fattah al-Sisi, became president. He has imposed a more comprehensive and vicious police state than anything attempted in Mubarak's era. Tens of thousands of Egyptians have been thrown into jail for everything from direct opposition to the regime to simply ridiculing the president. Hundreds have been executed after trials condemned as unfair by human rights groups.
The dethroning of Hosni Mubarak followed a popular revolution days earlier in Tunisia. The events at the start of 2011 in Egypt, traditionally the cultural and political hub of the Arab world, had within weeks inspired uprisings across the Middle East.
The uprisings changed everything, but not in the way that protestors chanting for freedom and the fall of the regimes had been hoping.
The hard men struck back. Hundreds of thousands have died and millions have lost their homes. Jihadist extremists prospered, providing their own version of the truth to young people oppressed by dictatorships fighting for their own survival.
Removing entrenched authoritarian leaders is very difficult, particularly when regimes are supported by foreign powers that believe they make reliable allies.
The regime in Egypt would have struggled to survive without financial help from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. President Sisi has also had vital political support from the west.
In Paris last December President Emmanuel Macron of France decorated the former field marshal with the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour.
The veteran Egyptian human rights campaigner, Laila Soueif, who has two children currently in jail for opposing the Sisi regime, told me in a Zoom interview that Western governments needed to change their ways.
"I know that Western politicians are selling their people the line that they have to back the regime in Egypt and similar regimes around the area, because this is the only way to achieve the stability. And if you do not actually have stability, you will have millions of immigrants and you will have terrorism blah blah blah..."
"Now this is their alibi. It's not true... British people should hold the government accountable for what it's doing or selling or how it's working for the benefit of arms and energy companies rather than people."
While regimes have held on to power they have not restored stability, or consent. The Middle East is in a long and difficult process of change.
The 2011 uprisings were fuelled by the anger of young people who were fed up with corruption, repression and unemployment. All those grievances still exist. More under-30s in Arab countries are jobless than anywhere else in the world.
Anger smoulders across the Middle East. Already this year, there were big protests against mass unemployment in Tunisia, the only Arab country to emerge from 2011 with a new democracy. Demonstrators attacked public buildings in Lebanon, a country that is in economic and political collapse.
The attitudes of the young matter, because they make up the majority of the population. The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic will amplify everything.
The hopes of decade ago were crushed.
History shows that repression works, until desperation overcomes fear, and then it doesn't.
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The UK's data-privacy watchdog is investigating why one of its corporate credit cards was used to spend £6,248.40 at luxury chocolate specialist Hotel Chocolat.
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The charge was disclosed via a public declaration of the Information Commissioner's Office recent spending.
It indicates the purchase was made the week before Christmas.
The ICO is funded via a fee imposed on bodies that process personal data. It also receives a government grant.
The internal probe was sparked by an investigation by news website Insider, which flagged the spend on Monday.
'High standards'
"This payment is currently subject to an internal investigation," the watchdog said in a statement.
"We believe that the transaction has been made contrary to ICO policies.
"The ICO is committed to upholding high standards in all aspects of our financial management and controls.
"Should a contravention of our finance policies be confirmed, we will take appropriate action, including ensuring the payment is reimbursed."
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Three Californian companies - Apple, Google and Facebook - now dominate the internet and are in a battle for supremacy over our online lives. And last night we saw another important episode in the power play between these three giants.
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Rory Cellan-JonesTechnology correspondent@BBCRoryCJon Twitter
Tim Cook's opening keynote at Apple's World Wide Developer Conference had plenty to excite the real afficionados in the form of upgrades to the MacBook Air and Pro range of laptops, rather less to a wider world which pays attention to a new iPhone or iPad but not much else.
But what was significant to the shape of the industry was Apple's growing love affair with Facebook and the deepening cold war with Google. The announcements about iOS6, the latest version of the mobile operating system which is now more important to Apple than the Mac OS itself, showed Facebook being welcomed inside the tent while Google was pitched out.
When iOS6 comes along in the autumn, hundreds of millions of iPhone and iPad users will find that Facebook is heavily integrated into everything from sharing photos to contacts and calendar entries that mirror your social networking activity.
Meanwhile, when you go to the Maps app, you will no longer find the Google product that has been there since the iPhone's launch, but a new Apple version. After buying up a mapping business last year, the company is now promising users "Apple-designed cartography, turn-by-turn navigation and an amazing new Flyover view". But not, you will note, the Google Streetview capability that has until now been available on its mobile devices.
Last week, in an apparent attempt to gets its retaliation in first, Google unveiled a series of upgrades to its Maps service, including 3D mapping much like that Flyover view promised by Apple.
Google and Apple used to be close allies, with the search firm's Eric Schmidt sitting on the Apple board. But, as was made clear in last year's biography of Steve Jobs, the iron entered the Apple founder's soul when Google launched its Android mobile operating system.
As the internet goes mobile, there's a huge amount at stake for both companies, and maps are a key weapon in the battle to be top dog. The nascent mobile advertising industry is heavily focussed on location based services, so owning the dominant mapping system could prove very lucrative.
The next move in this chess game is Google's. Presumably the firm will release a Google Maps app, complete with Streetview and 3D flyovers, for Apple's iOS 6 in the autumn. Unless Apple wants to take on the competition authorities, it will have to approve the app, and let users choose between the two mapping systems. But consumer inertia being what it is, most will probably stick with the default Apple option.
What next? Google replaced by Bing as the default search engine on iPhones and iPads? Tim Cook may seem mild-mannered compared to his predecessor as Apple CEO, but he's already shown he has the stomach for a fight.
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Thousands of ceramic poppies used in the Tower of London installation have gone on display in Yorkshire.
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Yorkshire Sculpture Park near Wakefield will host the arch segment, also known as "Wave", until January.
The installation in London last year marked 100 years since the start of World War One and drew more than five million visitors.
Each poppy represents a British and Commonwealth death during the war.
The Yorkshire Regiment raised 24 Battalions served by 65,000 men, of whom 9,000 died.
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Take the art works of Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Tintoretto and Caravaggio, the operas of Verdi and Puccini, the cinema of Federico Fellini, add the architecture of Venice, Florence and Rome and you have just a fraction of Italy's treasures from over the centuries.
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While the country is renowned for these and other delights, it is also notorious for its precarious political life, and has had several dozen governments since the end of the Second World War.
The Italian political landscape underwent a seismic shift in the early 1990s when the "mani pulite" ("clean hands") operation exposed corruption at the highest levels of politics and big business.
Several former prime ministers were implicated and thousands of businessmen and politicians were investigated.
There were high hopes at the time that the scandal would give rise to a radical reform of Italian political culture, but these hopes were dashed when the old structures were replaced by a new political landscape dominated by the multi-millionaire businessman Silvio Berlusconi, who himself became increasingly mired in scandals and corruption affairs.
More recently, populist parties have made the political running, and formed a coalition government in 2018.
FACTS
Italian Republic
Capital: Rome
Population 61 million
Area 301,338 sq km (116,346 sq miles)
Major language Italian
Major religion Christianity
Life expectancy 81 years (men), 86 years (women)
Currency euro
LEADERS
President: Sergio Mattarella
Sergio Mattarella, a constitutional court judge and veteran centre-left politician, was elected president by parliament in 2015 to succeed Giorgio Napolitano, who stepped down due to old age.
He was little known to the general public, but is a respected figure in political circles after a 25-year parliamentary career and several stints as minister in governments of left and right.
Prime minister: Giuseppe Conte
Giuseppe Conte was sworn in in June 2018 as prime minister of Western Europe's first populist government, whose aim was to cut taxes, boost welfare spending and overhaul European Union rules on budgets and immigration.
Mr Conte, a law professor, was the choice of the far-right League and the radical 5-Star Movement, which formed a governing coalition and ended three months of political deadlock following inconclusive elections.
In August 2019, League leader Matteo Salvini withdrew from the government in the hope of triggering early elections and boosting his party's position in parliament.
But the 5-Star Movement and centre-left Democratic Party frustrated this plan by agreeing a new coalition without the League, with Giuseppe Conte retaining his position as prime minister.
MEDIA
Italy's heady blend of politics and media has often made headlines at home and abroad, with concern regularly being expressed over the concentration of media ownership in the hands of one man - former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi.
Mr Berlusconi's Mediaset empire operates Italy's top private TV stations, and the public broadcaster, Rai, has traditionally been subject to political influence, so that when Mr Berlusconi was prime minister, he was able to exert tight control over both public and private broadcasting.
Between them, Rai and Mediaset dominate Italy's TV market and are a potentially powerful political tool, especially as 80% of the population is said to rely on television for its daily news - the highest percentage in the EU.
TIMELINE
1861 - Italy becomes a nation-state under King Victor Emmanuel II.
1915 - Italy enters First World War on the side of the Allies.
1922 - Fascist leader Benito Mussolini forms government, moves country towards fascist dictatorship.
1935 - Italy invades Ethiopia.
1936 - Benito Mussolini forms an alliance with Nazi Germany.
1940-45: Italy fights in Second World War on the German side. Invaded by the Allies in 1943, it signs an armistice. Benito Mussolini is captured and executed by partisans as the war ends.
1948 - New constitution. Christian Democrats win elections.
1951 - Italy joins European Coal and Steel Community, the forerunner of the European Community.
1970s - Italy experiences a decade of political violence from the left and right.
1980s - Economy makes significant advances.
1994 - Media magnate Silvio Berlusconi forms first right-wing government after the "clean hands" scandal sweeps away the previous political elite.
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Bullying blights the lives of many pupils, but what happens when children are left so sick with anxiety that they refuse to go to school? In the Midlands, a tiny specialist school has been helping youngsters rediscover their confidence and achieve their potential.
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By Clare LissamanBBC News
When you walk into the reception of Northleigh House School, Benji the school dog soon offers his paw, and there's the homely aroma of cakes being baked.
New pupils here soon learn that teachers are to be addressed by their first names and discover that teaching is either one to one or in small groups.
Pupils are encouraged to work at their own pace and new students start off gradually; in the early stages they are even allowed to sleep in an upstairs room if they choose.
Lily Povey had changed primary school four times as a result of bullying and had not been in mainstream education for two years when she began attending Northleigh in 2015.
One memory that endures from the days before Northleigh is of a girl spitting on her plate of food after being encouraged by another.
The 18-year-old can't ever recall being happy at school before she left mainstream education.
"I think it was the whole environment in general; I just didn't get along with it and I wasn't very social," she says.
"I didn't like to talk to other kids and I just kept to myself. With primary school, some girls were quite nasty from about eight.
"I had to be forced to go - I really hated it. I would cry and would make up any excuse not to go."
Some girls who bullied her went on to the same senior school and encouraged others to put her down.
"It got to the point that I couldn't go in any more; it would just make me feel sick."
Aaron Kirsch's story is a similar one.
Growing up in a small Warwickshire village, he was anxious about the move to a large senior school shortly after his 11th birthday. Diagnosed with dyslexia, he also worried about the workload.
He was soon struggling with the change and his anxiety escalated after he was bullied on the bus home.
"It was name calling from a main group of people," he says. "It was physical a little bit as well - it wasn't massive, just pushing and shoving.
"I was already very anxious and that added to it."
Aaron could no longer face the bus journeys and his parents began driving him to school.
"I wouldn't even leave the house, so getting to school was always a struggle and some days I ran in front of the car as they were trying to pull away," he says.
Near the end of his first term, in December 2011, he panicked after being dropped off.
He remembers a teacher taking him to an office and locking the door, telling him to unlock it from the inside and go to class when he felt ready.
"I had a massive panic attack when he left me on my own," he said.
"I rang my dad and I told him what had happened and he picked me and I never went back again."
Aaron's parents were able to get local authority funding so he could become one of the first pupils at Northleigh House.
The school had been set up months earlier by retired couple Viv and Fred Morgan in their former B&B in Hatton, near Warwick.
Mrs Morgan says the idea for the school stemmed from her picking up a newspaper left by a B&B guest and being shocked to read the story of Simone Grice, a vulnerable 15-year-old who left school through bullying and later took her own life.
She ultimately decided to set up a school where vulnerable children could benefit from a "therapeutic learning environment".
Seven years on and Northleigh House, which Mrs Morgan says gets a lot of support from the community and local firms, has taught about 70 youngsters.
For Aaron, going there was a huge turning point.
"I basically went straight to Northleigh and I loved it instantly," he says.
"There was a fire lit and it has always felt very homely. It always felt safe because of that.
"They won't make you do something if you are not ready and they focus on you as a person.
"And they realise that if you are doing well mentally, then you'll do well at school."
Receptionist Nikki Perks explains how some new children are so anxious they "will not get out of the car". She finds one of the most rewarding things about working here is seeing pupils' confidence blossom.
The criteria for attending are simply "struggling and not going to school".
"We don't know if they have been bullied because they don't tell you," says Mrs Morgan.
The emphasis is on kindness and respect - "happiness first and learning after". Pastoral sessions are emphasised and children are encouraged to speak about their problems.
Mrs Morgan says she has taken away some of the "structure" of mainstream education, in that her pupils work at their own pace, concentrate on subjects that most interest them and are "not shouted at".
However, she insists this style of learning is "not a soft option". There are clocks in all rooms and pupils have to get to lessons on time.
"We adjust to what they can do, and they do very well," she says.
Woodwork and photography are among popular activities, as well as learning about nature from the school's wildlife pond.
Ofsted inspectors rated the school satisfactory in 2012 and said areas such as pupils' progress and quality of education could be improved. But they liked its overall philosophy and said it was helping bullied children recover.
Staff set about fulfilling inspectors' requirements and now Northleigh offers the full GSCE curriculum and some A-levels to its 30 children aged 11 to 17.
It employs 25 teachers, including four who work full time. The school was rated good in 2016 in its last Ofsted report, which praised its "excellent pastoral care" and found staff were very skilled at helping children have more confidence in themselves and their abilities.
"Pupils who were fearful and used to hide away are now starting to enjoy meeting others and learning from new experiences," inspectors said.
A Centre for Social Justice report said it was estimated about 16,000 children between the ages of 11 and 15 were absent from state schools in England with bullying as the main reason.
The Department for Education said schools should respond sensitively and do "all they can to ensure that all children can attend school in a calm and safe environment". In extreme cases, when a child cannot be reintegrated into school, it could mean a transfer to another mainstream school or "alternative provision".
Lauren Seager-Smith, chief executive of charity Kidscape, says how each school deals with this is a "lottery" and they need more support.
Educational provision across England for children who self-exclude because of bullying is "patchy" and dependent on where they live, she says.
Lily certainly feels as though Northleigh has enabled her to have the education she was unable to receive before.
At first, she felt scared at Northleigh and ate lunch alone, but gradually grew in confidence.
She says she had "very low self-esteem" but was helped by pastoral sessions with a caring mentor.
"I always remember my mentor continually reassuring me to believe in myself and telling me that I could do whatever I wanted to do, no matter what anyone else said," she says.
"That has stuck with me since and always will - because she was right."
Lily and Aaron have now left Northleigh, where not only did they find a love of learning, they also found each other. The teenagers have been in a relationship for 18 months.
She began a hairdressing course at college last year, with Aaron waiting in the library on her first day to support her.
Lily is enjoying college, where she is moving to a health and social care course, and is feeling positive about the future.
"Before, I wouldn't speak to anybody really. I found it very difficult," she says.
"I couldn't get my words out and was still very anxious when I went to college, but felt I could do it."
Aaron has discovered a love of science, a subject he previously "hated".
He started college in 2016 to study psychology and biology A-levels and is looking forward to starting a third A-level in his favourite subject, chemistry, in September. He hopes to go on to university to study medicine.
"There was no chance I was going back to secondary school, so without Northleigh I wouldn't have even got my GCSEs," he says.
"I don't know where I would be without Northleigh, to be honest."
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World War One was commemorated by swimmers in fancy dress who took to the cold water off the Pembrokeshire coast for the annual New Year's Day swim.
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More than 1,500 people took to the sea at Saundersfoot at lunchtime, cheered on by a crowd of about 8,000.
X-Factor finalist Jay James, who is from the town, started the swim.
There was also a mascot race prior to the start of the main event, with Danny Dog of Heatherton Country Sports Park winning.
Over its 31-year history, the swim has raised more than £500,000 for charity.
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A man and a woman were found dead in a house smelling of gas after neighbours checked on their welfare, police said.
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Emergency services were called to Becclesgate in Dereham, Norfolk, shortly before midday, when the pair were found unresponsive.
Norfolk Fire and Rescue Service entered the house first for a safety check and evacuated nearby homes as a precaution.
Norfolk Police said it was investigating and was treating the deaths as unexplained.
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It might appear to be a pursuit perfectly suited to the lockdown age, but a south of Scotland poet has been using the time of social isolation to bring fellow writers - from across the country and beyond - together to perform their work online.
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By Giancarlo RinaldiSouth Scotland reporter, BBC Scotland news website
More than a month ago, Dumfries-based Hugh McMillan started writing on his blog about poems and poets he liked.
It quickly expanded as he tried to "rustle up some favours" from others to perform their "poems from the backroom".
"I was very surprised how keen folk were to record themselves in lockdown," he said.
"And though there have been many technical challenges, I'm very pleased with the way the project is working."
'I'm a lot less restless'
One of those taking part - from hundreds of miles away - is Donald Murray. Originally from the Isle of Lewis, he now lives in Shetland.
"Despite my reluctance to engage with technology, I was very happy to get involved with Hugh's idea," he said.
Mr Murray said the lockdown had also allowed him - or perhaps forced him - to concentrate on his work.
"I must confess I'm a lot less restless as a result of the coronavirus," he said.
"I'm an extrovert - in a lot of ways.
"I have no choice, however, but to get down and write at the moment. It removes the temptation to do other things.
"This is especially true in Shetland which - in percentage terms - has been the worst affected area in Scotland."
Another poet involved is Glasgow-based Magi Gibson, originally from Kilsyth.
She co-edits the magazine The Poets' Republic with Mr McMillan, and said she was happy to be involved with any of his "madcap ideas".
Ms Gibson, who lives with her husband, comedy novelist Ian Macpherson, said that coronavirus had not had a huge effect on some parts of their lives.
"We write daytime at home in separate rooms, so lockdown hasn't been much change," she explained.
However, it has had an impact on promotional events and she has been missing her family and getting out to poetry readings.
As a result, she has welcomed the online gathering created by Mr McMillan.
"I've only just in the past few days turned to coronavirus/lockdown as a theme as I've been working on my collection," she said.
"I always write about what's going on around me, and I'm often political, so it's inevitable these themes - and political anger, I imagine - will seep into my writing over the coming year."
Brian Johnstone from Edinburgh, who has lived near St Andrews for many years, has been using the time in lockdown to work on a memoir as well as sharing his poetry.
"I've been amazed by the burgeoning of poems posted on social media and have been taking part in various other online initiatives to spread poetry - and art work in general - around," he said.
"I think people find the concision and precise observation of poetry something they can hold on to at these often stressful times."
Mr McMillan said that as well as allowing the poets to express themselves, the work has also been of interest outside the writing community.
"I know of very many people who look forward not just to this blog - which I think is unique in its form and scope - but others like it," he said.
"Poetry is singular in cutting to the chase: saying the things that make people think, feel and empathise."
'It calms us'
That is a view echoed by Ms Gibson, who has regularly spoken about how people tend to say: "Poetry's not for me."
"Then, when a crisis hits, they do turn to poetry, for comfort, for words that soothe, that untangle and perhaps express the storm of emotions they're overwhelmed by," she added.
"A poem might be a temporary escape hatch, a return ticket to a time or place of happiness."
Mr Murray said that hearing poets recite their work was something people were hopefully pre-programmed to enjoy, particularly at a time like this.
"We all like to be told stories when we're anxious. It calms us," he said.
"It's why children like their parents to read to them - an instinct that stays with us to the end."
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Jacqueline O'Neill works as a paramedic in Belfast. It's a job she's been doing for 12 years. Her husband works in the control room; their two and a half-year-old son loves ambulances. It's a family thing.
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By Marie-Louise ConnollyBBC News NI Health Correspondent
We've been out on the road for just three hours.
It's midday and already she's been to a road traffic accident, a fall and a suspected case of septicaemia.
As we respond to another 999 call, she tells me why she likes the job.
"I like the not-knowing what is going to happen next. You literally go from one call that is life-threatening or where someone has died to something that is totally ridiculous like the time a man called me after he'd stubbed his toe."
'Cajoling and checking'
Meeting targets is part of the job.
Unlike their counterparts in England, the Northern Ireland Ambulance Service is performance managed on a target of reaching 72.5% of category A calls within eight minutes.
As I discover, not all 999 calls are worthy of emergency status.
It puts unnecessary pressure on a service that's already overstretched. And it's for that reason that the ambulance service wants to review and change how it responds to emergency calls.
Next stop is Millfield in Belfast, where Jacqueline has been called to a crash.
The woman who was driving isn't injured but her husband, a passenger, has left the scene. He vomited getting out of the car and appears disorientated.
Within minutes the police arrive and the woman's husband is found slightly shaken. Vitals are taken, a wound is dressed, statements are given and all the while Jacqueline is comforting, cajoling and checking.
'David Attenborough'
It's non-stop but Jacqueline appears to take it all in her stride.
Jacqueline says the biggest part of the job is talking to people. For those who know Jacqueline, that comes easily.
During my second day of filming, out with the ambulance service's rapid response vehicle, the atmosphere is quiet and more serious.
There has been a serious road crash. A police helicopter is dispatched and within minutes we find ourselves at the Royal Victoria Hospital's emergency department.
Several people are injured with what we are told are life-threatening conditions. One woman is in resuscitation.
The paramedic officer is John McClintock. His small stature masks his energy and passion for the job. Ashen-faced and with eyes welling up, he describes the scene.
"This morning I faced people fighting for their lives and some people not fighting for their lives.
"I had to start prioritising patients, deciding who goes first - everyone has a loved one there and everyone would want their loved one to go first. But unfortunately we have to make that decision.
"Then you hear the screaming, agony and pain. You know people are fighting for their lives.
"Someone today will get a knock on the door - this is the reality of our job.
"We are a strange breed. It's a wonder David Attenborough hasn't done a programme on us.
"I suppose we have a black humour that protects us to a certain degree. The problem is when you get back home the emotion starts to hit you.
"Nights you don't sleep, you question if you did enough - you question life. But the stability you get is from your family at home."
Language issues
An hour later, I'm back with Jacqueline in the rapid response vehicle and heading across to east Belfast.
A woman has dialled 999 as her daughter is vomiting.
At last Jacqueline faces a challenge.
As she comes out to collect more equipment, Jacqueline tells me that no-one in the house speaks English.
"The lady is a foreign national and she doesn't speak any English.
"We have the language line available if necessary but this time I have been able to cope."
My 24 hours with the ambulance service has been an education. It's busy - sometimes dangerous.
While those I spoke to said the role was tiring even frustrating - no-one said they'd walk away from what is an obviously extremely tough profession.
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What has been happening with the East Coast mainline?
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The company that runs it, a joint venture between Stagecoach, which holds 90% of the franchise, and Virgin Trains, which has the other 10%, is giving back its right to run the line early.
That move has sparked two inquiries, one by the public spending watchdog, the National Audit Office, and one by a specialist committee of MPs.
How was it meant to work?
Virgin Trains and its bigger partner Stagecoach paid £3.3bn in 2015 for the right to run the line until 2023.
The route runs from London's Kings Cross station, up through Peterborough and passes through Leeds, York and Newcastle on its way to Edinburgh.
But, just three years into its eight-year franchise, they are giving up.
Virgin boss Sir Richard Branson has said the deal cost Virgin and Stagecoach more than £100m.
The government view is that they were simply over-confident. They based their bid on an increase in passenger numbers that didn't materialise.
Transport Secretary Chris Grayling has conceded that there is a tendency for franchise bidders to "overbid" to make sure they are successful.
Others say Network Rail let them down by lagging behind on a programme of rail improvements which would have allowed them to increase the number of services.
Who loses out?
On the face of it, the government will lose the remaining £2.3bn of the £3.3bn promised by the franchise. However, the amount it will lose or gain ultimately will depend on what sort of money the replacement service can generate.
Although the two companies at the centre of the franchise say they have lost money on it, they are still interested in - and will get the chance to run - other parts of the network.
Virgin Trains runs trains on the West Coast line from Euston through Birmingham to Glasgow. Meanwhile Stagecoach is on the shortlist for the East Midlands franchise from London St Pancras to Sheffield.
What happens now?
There shouldn't be any disruption in the short term.
Transport Secretary Chris Grayling says it is important that passengers don't lose out and he's determined that services will not be affected.
His department is currently putting arrangements in place to take over the running of the East Coast mainline service until more wide-ranging reforms are rolled out in 2020.
Mr Grayling says it will either be run on a not-for-profit basis or it will get taken into government hands.
Why do I have a sense of deja vu?
This is the third franchise on this route to run into trouble.
In 2005, GNER signed a £1.35bn, 10-year deal in what was then the biggest contract in European railway history. One year later it was stripped of the route.
In August 2007, National Express agreed a £1.4bn deal, but then handed it back to the government in 2009 against the particularly challenging background of the financial crisis.
It was then government-run until Stagecoach and Virgin's £3.3bn bid in 2015.
Will rail franchising be affected?
The National Audit Office and the Transport Committee both think there are lessons to learn and that they will get to the bottom of it with their inquiries.
The affair has led to renewed debate over public ownership of rail franchises, with Labour's Lord Andrew Adonis, who was responsible for re-nationalising the route in 2009, accusing the government of "bailing out" private firms.
Lilian Greenwood, chairwoman of the Transport Committee, said the failure of the East Coast franchise had wider implications for rail franchising and the competitiveness of the current system.
She added that there were "serious questions to be asked of the train operator, Network Rail and ministers", and said the Transport Committee intended to ask them.
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Healthcare tops most lists of voters' concerns in the US mid-term elections, but it gets precious little coverage in the national media. At a clinic in West Virginia, patients and staff explain why they think the system is broken.
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By Ritu PrasadBBC News, Charleston, West Virginia
Nearly all the streets in Charleston are quiet on this weekday afternoon, despite it being the state capital.
The road to the clinic is lined with old gas stations and older houses in varying states of disrepair.
In a nondescript brick building, 61-year-old Chevone Daly sits on an exam table in a white-walled room.
She first came here in 2010, after an emergency appendectomy became infected. Without her own doctor to see, she was told: Go to the emergency room or go to the free clinic.
Ms Daly tells me "nobody" she knows can afford healthcare anymore.
Most patients at this clinic are like Ms Daly - America's working poor, who find themselves with nowhere to go and no money to spend when they fall ill.
At West Virginia Health Right, providers and patients echo the same admonition - the system is broken.
And changes introduced by President Barack Obama that were meant to serve as a safety net have left many still slipping through the cracks.
As patients enter the clinic, a glass window plastered with flyers - reminders about wellness classes and prescriptions - greets them.
And in the centre, a note reads: No matter what happens with the Affordable Care Act, we will remain open for business.
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), better known as Obamacare, was a Democratic answer to America's ever-increasing healthcare spending - still the highest in the world.
Using state-run marketplaces, President Barack Obama's signature policy expanded insurance coverage to those unable to access programmes for the poor (Medicaid) and elderly (Medicare).
Its most popular provision by far is the rule that insurers cannot deny coverage over pre-existing conditions like cancer, diabetes and pregnancy. Its least popular consequence has been steadily rising insurance costs.
The latest ACA government report says 2019 premiums are stabilising, more insurers are participating and average premiums have decreased by 1.5% for the first time since 2014. But, premiums for the second-lowest cost plan still increased 37% between 2017 and 2018.
The Trump administration has taken credit for the drop, but some experts say it was due to higher insurance company profits from increasing premiums this year, and that Republican efforts to destabilise the ACA have ultimately made it costlier.
Currently, 11.8m Americans have insurance through the ACA, but around 15.5% are still uninsured - up 2.8% from 2016.
According to a new Pew Research Center study, more than half of Republicans and three-quarters of Democrats say the affordability of healthcare is a "very big" problem.
Founded in 1982, West Virginia Health Right (WVHR) is the state's largest free clinic, offering no-cost, holistic healthcare for the under-insured and uninsured. With a budget of around $3m (£2.2m) from grants and donations, the clinic provides over $15m of care annually.
As one of the unhealthiest states in the nation, with the highest rate of drug overdoses, obesity and smoking, West Virginia has acutely felt the impacts of national healthcare policies.
WVHR saw 21,000 patients before the ACA. After the law, that number dipped to 15,500, suggesting that fewer patients were in dire need - but that welcome news only lasted so long.
"Now we have 26,211 patients," says Mrs Angie Settle, 47, nurse practitioner and CEO of WVHR. "We've far exceeded where we were."
And they expect to keep growing as ACA costs rise.
Mrs Settle says the ACA has been "a horrible failure".
At WVHR, 83% of patients have a job. Many purchased insurance through the marketplace at first, but were forced to drop it.
The nurse practitioner says many of the insurance plans required patients to cover the first $5,000 to $10,000 of their costs.
"It might as well have been $5 million because these people are living paycheck to paycheck. It was totally beyond their reach," Mrs Settle says.
"You have people making $1500 a month, with rent, childcare and whatever else they have to do. And it's nothing to have one patient on six to eight medications."
Mrs Settle also notes that co-pays - the fixed amount insured patients pay - in these plans could be around $50 per service or medication.
She shakes her head.
"When you multiply that, it's ridiculous."
The ACA's high cost has been at the heart of the Republican attack on Democrats for years. Repealing the act was a cornerstone of Donald Trump's 2016 campaign.
With a Republican-controlled Washington, the last two years have seen a slow but steady dismantling of the ACA: the individual mandate was repealed, enrolment periods shortened, ad budgets slashed, reimbursement payments ended.
The ACA has been hobbling along, but with high premium, prescription and deductible costs, fixing it is a key midterm issue.
But the difference now is that Democrats are embracing it as their number one issue.
According to a recent report by the Wesleyan Media Project, 50% of all Democratic ads in federal-level campaigns tackled healthcare - a stark contrast to Republicans' 21%.
Last week, President Trump published an opinion piece warning voters that government-run healthcare would bring the country "dangerously closer to socialism", and in June, his administration backed a lawsuit against the pre-existing conditions clause.
But many Republicans up for re-election have scrubbed harsher critiques of the ACA from their campaign pages.
Cathy McMorris Rodgers, a congresswoman of Washington state, swapped her nearly 300-word statement on repealing the "radical health care bill" for two paragraphs on local policies.
Rhonda Francis, 49, WVHR's clinical and pharmacy coordinator, joined 19 years ago when she says turning patients away at retail pharmacies when they couldn't afford their co-pays took its toll.
She described how some newly-insured clinic patients ended up self-regulating medications like insulin to avoid out-of-pocket payments - and ended up in the ER as a result.
"If the patient is going to go without and can't afford it, what's the point? They're just going to jack up hospital costs. Somebody's going to have to pay for it, eventually."
"Healthcare should be universal across the line," she adds. "How are you to know who's going to be able to pay what?"
In West Virginia, a precarious job climate has seen some residents making six-figures one day and being unemployed and uninsured the next.
"We have patients who've worked all their life and they're really sad when they come in here," Ms Francis says. "They're like, 'I would never have thought I'd be in this situation.'"
Other voices on healthcare
As tensions rise, health policy analyst Paul Keckley believes America is near a tipping point.
"Going into 2020, presidential candidates will have to address specifically their plans to transform the system," he says.
"It'll basically boil down to one of two theories - healthcare is a fundamental right, or, healthcare is a marketplace."
Mr Keckley, who served as a mitigator between industry and lawmakers at the White House during the early stages of the ACA, adds that without a fix, the country will "absolutely" see debilitating cost increases for patients.
Capping spending, like European systems do, will be key, he says.
So will linking social services and healthcare - most comparable nations spend far more on preventive and primary services than the US.
"We call a lot of those 'welfare programmes', so they have a stigma, and yet we're finding out if people live in areas of food insecurity or have unclean air and water or high crime rates, guess what? Their care is going to be more costly and they're not going to be as healthy."
But fleshed out solutions from politicians are still few and far-between.
When I ask WVHR patient Ms Daly what could fix healthcare for people like her, she looks down and quietly offers: "Maybe more like what Canada's is?"
Progressive Democrats have been pushing a system like Canada's and Britain's- so-called Medicare for All, as proposed by former Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders.
Funded by higher-taxes, the universal plan would expand America's pension programme to everyone, taking the burden of paying premiums, co-pays and deductibles out of the equation.
It would cause US spending on healthcare to increase by more than $3tn according to one analysis - but if nothing changes with the present system, the US could spend over $5tn by 2026.
A March Kaiser Health poll found 59% of Americans do favour a Medicare for All plan, including about a third of Republicans polled. One in 10 voters said a candidate's views on a national health plan will be the most important factor they consider.
But keeping protections for those with pre-existing conditions could become the most important issue for any candidate. Last month, Kaiser polls showed 75% of the public were in favour of the policy.
In West Virginia, Democrat Joe Manchin, up for re-election next month, has emphasised this in his campaign against Republican challenger Patrick Morrisey.
His state will certainly feel the loss of the pre-existing conditions clause if Republicans end it.
Indeed, there is a sense of "panic" among patients and staff at the clinic about losing that provision from the ACA. Many told me about the staggering rates of obesity, diabetes, substance abuse and mental health issues in West Virginia.
As she sits in a dentist's chair on the second-floor of the clinic, 21-year-old Ricci Shannon, says West Virginians rarely think about their own health in terms of risk.
"It's such a financial issue for people and they live not-healthy lifestyles," she says. "No one my age even thinks about it."
"I'm a person who fell through the cracks," says Margaret Grassie, 57, by way of introduction. "And this clinic saved my life."
"I woke up and my prescriptions were $1200 a month," she says. "With the medications I take and the pre-existing conditions I have, there was no way. I couldn't afford it."
Despite working full-time, Ms Grassie could only afford catastrophic coverage from the ACA marketplace. That meant her policy applied just in drastic cases - "I literally had to get hit by a bus," she explains.
"Donald Trump doesn't give a crap about me. Hillary Clinton didn't give a crap about me," Ms Grassie adds.
"We get written off."
She tells me West Virginians are scared of healthcare. She tells me of a friend, employed for 33 years, who cannot afford to see a doctor for even preventative care.
"[If] she quits her job, drops her income and ends up here, she gets the help she needs," Ms Grassie says, gesturing at the free clinic behind her.
"[People] are doing their jobs, showing up everyday for 33 years - and walk out with no insurance."
As the midterms approach, poll numbers show addressing the cracks and crevices of this health system remains the number one issue for voters, regardless of party.
"It's gonna take a miracle," Ms Grassie says with a laugh. "But I think the ACA is a good place to start - fixing it."
Photographs by Hannah Long-Higgins
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A 58-year-old woman has pleaded guilty to conspiracy to kidnap at Mold Crown Court.
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The charge relates to an alleged conspiracy to kidnap a child in Gaerwen, Anglesey, between 1 July and 5 November last year.
Two other people pleaded guilty to the same charge last December at Mold Crown Court.
Four more people have denied the charge and will go on trial later this year.
Another man charged, Robert Frith, 65, died whilst on remand at HMP Berwyn in Wrexham.
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When a leading medical expert urged people to prepare for a "digital Christmas" last week, the response was mixed. But amid the frustration and "mistletoe and Zoom" jokes, some people were already rearranging their plans.
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"I imagine the iPad and FaceTime will be on pretty much the whole day on Christmas Day," says Gail Buckie, from Edinburgh.
Gail's family live about 150 miles away on the Isle of Mull and she says "there's no way we'll be able to see them over Christmas" - especially with her mother considered vulnerable.
But she says she's already putting "a lot more effort" into this year's festivities - and has even booked Santa to visit her children at her doorstep because they won't be able to go to a grotto like usual.
"We've already started to stock up on extra Christmas lights," she tells BBC Radio 4's Today programme. "I think I've probably, in the past, been a bit more 'less is more' type thing, but with the children spending so much time inside, we're going to decorate their bedroom.
"It will be just a wee small thing for us," she says. "But we'll make it extra special trying to keep connected."
It's still too early to say what Christmas will be like for everyone.
But current restrictions in Scotland ban people from visiting other households indoors, while in England, millions of people are living under tier two or three restrictions, which also ban visiting others at home.
In Wales, there is currently a national lockdown requiring people to stay indoors, while in Northern Ireland indoor visits to other people's homes are also not allowed.
That means Gail isn't alone in planning a digital Christmas Day.
Mhairi Hamilton, from Larkhall, in South Lanarkshire, says she is "ahead of the curve" and has already cancelled her big family Christmas to avoid months of uncertainty.
"So I called it about six weeks ago and put a message round the family saying that I was not going to host in the house but I would host a Zoom Christmas," she tells BBC Radio Scotland.
"I would preserve what we could of the family traditions and we would take it from there. And the response I got from the extended family was nothing but positive. You know, things like, 'you mean we can do this in our jammies? You mean we don't have to drive?'. I'm going, yes, yes, yes."
Mhairi is currently in the process of making gift bags for her relatives, which will be filled with drinks and nibbles, and the whole family will open their Secret Santa presents on a video call.
"I'm ahead of the game and I'm loving it," she says. "I'm having a great time preparing. There are undoubtedly many, many positives to be taken from it."
Becky Goddard-Hill, a parenting blogger from Nottingham, is equally positive. "I think we can still have that family gathering but just in a different way," she says.
'It will probably be chaos'
She's planning a carol concert with members of her family over video call, and a cook-a-long with her mother-in-law to bake a Christmas cake.
"I'll get my kids to open their advent calendar with their grandparents online each morning just so they're still very, very much a part of our Christmas and there's still a lot of fun and togetherness at the heart of it," she says.
"It will probably be absolute chaos but I think that's part of the fun, isn't it? It's that being together, throwing your enthusiasm behind it."
She also suggests watching a film together at the same time as relatives living elsewhere, or sending handmade cards and long handwritten letters.
But for some, the prospect of a virtual Christmas is nothing but unappealing - especially if they will be on their own.
"This Christmas my husband, a serving soldier, will be at work on Christmas Day, and my brother, who I would normally spend Christmas Day with, died in August," says Helen Kemp, 56, who lives in the Yorkshire Dales.
"I don't have children and other than my cousin, who has invited me for Christmas Day to her house, I don't have any close relatives nearby anymore."
Helen says she will spend Christmas morning at work - at a charity that gives discounted holidays to vulnerable people, including the homeless. "But after that, I really didn't want to have to spend the rest of the day, until my husband comes home at half six at night, on my own."
Her area is currently in tier one - medium alert - where household mixing is still allowed in groups of up to six. But "who knows what we will be by Christmas", she adds.
"It has been a tough year for all of us and we need to have some normality back into our lives.
"Spending Christmas Day with family, rather than alone, is a way of normalising our lives again.
"I don't think anyone wants to be alone on Christmas Day, let alone after the year we have all had."
So what has the government said?
Earlier this week, No 10 said it was Prime Minister Boris Johnson's "ambition" for people to celebrate Christmas with their families.
But many scientists and politicians have taken a different view. Scotland's national clinical director Jason Leitch said it was "honestly too early to say" what would happen at Christmas - but it was "not going to be normal".
"People should get their digital Christmas ready," he said.
Prof John Edmunds, who sits on Sage, said the idea that people could "carry on as we are" and then have a normal Christmas with friends and family was "wishful thinking in the extreme".
And another Sage scientist said last week that Christmas was unlikely to be the "usual celebration" of "families coming together".
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A former Conservative councillor will face trial next year accused of an upskirting offence in a TK Maxx store.
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Lee Hawthorne, 40, is alleged to have committed the offence at the Northgate Street branch in Gloucester on 27 June 2019.
Mr Hawthorne, who resigned from Gloucester City Council in April, pleaded not guilty to the charge of voyeurism during a hearing at Bristol Crown Court.
His trial date is set for 14 April.
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Regeneration projects for Manx towns and villages have been "slow" to start, according to the Treasury Minister.
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Talking in the House of Keys on Tuesday, Anne Craine confirmed that "a healthy balance" of £500,000 is still available for regeneration during 2011.
The Minister confirmed that local groups have taken 'some time' to come forward with proposals.
Anne Craine said: "The purpose of this money is to put some civic pride back into our town and village centres."
She added: "The government intends to use local firms where ever possible and it has certainly been local business which has benefited in the design process."
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Europe's elections are just over a month away. Campaigns have started, but with a whimper. There are few signs, so far, that the European electorate is engaged. For the moment it is a ghost campaign - apart from the struggle for the top jobs in Brussels.
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Gavin HewittEurope editor@BBCGavinHewitton Twitter
Mainstream parties will argue over tax and spending and appeal to their traditional supporters, but in many countries this will be a referendum on the European project.
Many voters will have the chance to support parties disenchanted with Brussels and all its powers. The last few years have seen the rise of anti-establishment parties both from the left and right, some nationalist, some extreme and most of them drawing their support from being Eurosceptic and anti-immigration.
So the battle will be fought less over the minutiae of policy but in broad strokes about Europe itself.
In the past year successive polls have registered a widespread disillusionment with the European project. This will be the first Europe-wide election since the eurozone crisis.
The bond markets have moved on - cheerfully buying Greek debt. European officials declare the single currency repaired. But the hangover remains: over 26 million out of work, wages and pensions, in many places, slashed and debts still increasing. Last year Italy's debt rose to 132.6% of GDP. And after all the pain the unanswered question remains - is the future a low-growth Europe?
Backlash time?
The historian Niall Ferguson points out that a "political backlash usually follows an economic crisis" but, he argues, the real story is that "despite the severity of the shocks inflicted on European economies since 2008, most voters will back mainstream parties".
That is true to a point, but this election is a battle for legitimacy. A low turnout will undermine the standing of the European Parliament and a strong showing by anti-establishment parties - anywhere above 25% - will raise doubts about the manifest destiny of "ever closer union".
For the disillusioned this is not just a chance to cast an angry cross or tick against austerity. For many it goes much deeper. It is about insecurity and identity.
Europe's leaders have often misread globalisation's winners and losers. With high unemployment in many parts of the continent, ordinary workers are not just wary of further immigration but suspicious of an elite that does not address their fears. It is that vacuum that the anti-establishment parties are filling.
Almost certainly there will be a large protest vote - perhaps most strikingly in France with Marine Le Pen's Front National (FN) which is vying for first place with the centre-right UMP. She may well benefit from high unemployment and an economy struggling to find growth. But there are reasons for questioning whether these anti-establishment parties will be as successful as some predict
Democracy itself
Even if the protest parties do very well - say they get 30% of the seats - they will struggle to unite in the European Parliament.
Already Nigel Farage and Marine Le Pen are squabbling over whether anti-Semitism still exists in her party. Mr Farage has cast his support in the French race for Debout La Republique (Stand up for the Republic). And the mainstream parties will make common cause, forming alliances to pursue their goal of closer European integration and increasing the influence of the parliament itself.
The European Parliament, although often derided, is a much more important institution than it used to be. Only last week it was taking important steps towards banking union, voting on greater transparency for lobbyists and setting up a new European Fisheries Fund.
It is most unlikely that the anti-establishment parties in the new parliament will be able to block or undermine the work of the committees and the chamber. They disagree too much among themselves. They will be dismissed as wreckers, extremists and populists. All easy put-downs.
But the elections matter and not just because of the growing power of the parliament. The vote touches on deeper questions about the health of democracy, such as whether the governing elites are perceived as on the side of the people or their own political ideas. Is there a decline in political trust between the governed and those in power?
In another blog I will examine the contest for Europe's top jobs, including the president of the European Commission.
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Staff at a recycling centre are using diggers to help firefighters clear burnt and burning waste after a large blaze broke out there, the fire service said.
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Flames at VC Cooke on Ellough Road, Beccles, started just before 22:30 BST on Tuesday.
Suffolk Fire and Rescue Service said crews will remain on the 18-acre (7-hectare) site for most of the day.
Watch Commander Adrian Mason said the cause of the fire was not yet known.
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Sundance has snow, Cannes has sand while Venice has canals. But what makes the Toronto Film Festival special, and why is it now one of the most important events on the industry calendar?
BBC News journalist Neil Smith went to the festival in 2013 for the first time and asked some regular attendees what sets the event apart, what it is like to go there and why it has gone from strength to strength.
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Two hundred and eighty-eight features. More than 140 world premieres. Fifteen separate programmes featuring films from 70 different countries.
Whichever way you slice it, the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival - TIFF for short - is a gargantuan event.
Since it was first held in 1976 the festival has grown exponentially, aided in part by its apposite positioning at what is widely considered the onset of the annual film awards season.
From American Beauty and Crash to Slumdog Millionaire and The King's Speech, the annual Canadian showcase has consistently served as a crucial launch-pad for movies that have gone on to receive glory and plaudits.
A positive response in Toronto in September can get the ball rolling on an awards campaign that could result in that most coveted of accolades - an Academy Award - at the end of the following February.
'Extraordinary platform'
Small wonder the event bursts at the seams with promising new titles, all hoping to generate the all-important buzz that, if handled correctly, can translate into prizes, honours and the lucrative international box office that go with them.
"Toronto has become this extraordinary platform for many of the most serious films by some of the greatest film-makers in the world," says British actor Tom Hiddleston.
"The summer is over, it's a new season of film viewing and Toronto is there to herald that."
The British star of Thor, The Avengers and War Horse can speak from experience, having seen at first hand the importance of having a title in the festival programme.
When his period drama The Deep Blue Sea premiered there in 2011, it had yet to secure a North American distributor.
By the end of the festival, its rights had been sold to Music Box films, whose canny marketing helped its star Rachel Weisz land a Golden Globe nomination for best actress.
"It's a very good place to launch to North American distributors in particular, and it's quite often where you'll make your US domestic sale," says Sue Bruce-Smith, head of commercial and brand strategy at Film4.
"It's positioned itself very well, both in terms of the calendar and also the support it's shown film-makers over the years.
"It's always been supportive of British films and there have been many careers, particularly directors' careers, that have been launched off the back of it.
"The programming is very good and it is always significant if you are chosen - it's seen as a mark of quality."
Media spotlight
Unlike Cannes, Venice and many other leading festivals, Toronto does not appoint an international jury to sift through an official selection of films and garland those it finds most worthy.
Instead it asks its audience - a passionate, enthusiastic clientele who number in the thousands - to do the sifting for them, inviting them to name a "People's Choice" in a public ballot.
"It's an intelligent, literate crowd," says Hiddleston, who will be going again this year to support Jim Jarmusch's vampire romance Only Lovers Left Alive.
"It's very discerning, very engaged and full of people who love cinema of every stripe, shape and genre."
"Some will say 'oh, that's just Toronto, they're so kind and positive'," says Sue Bruce-Smith. "But I think that's just being cynical.
"The audiences are generally passionate about good film and that's what they're getting when they go and see this selection."
"Toronto really seems to me to be all about film," adds Hiddleston. "There's no kind of subsidiary interest in glamour or in fashion."
Not that the event will be without those elements. Indeed, the festival boasts a plethora of glitzy red-carpet premieres that, for a few days in September, will place the city in the full glare of the international media spotlight.
For some that glare is best appreciated in small doses. British director Ben Wheatley, for example, has no plans to linger once his latest film A Field in England has screened as part of the experimental Wavelengths strand.
"I usually go in, do a Q&A and get out," says the film-maker, who has two previous visits to Toronto under his belt. "I don't hang about."
"The key dates of the festival are the Thursday through to Tuesday," explains Bruce-Smith.
"I think the organisers are sometimes frustrated by the fact that everyone wants to go there for the opening weekend."
With hundreds of distributors, exhibitors and backers in attendance, it makes sound business sense for a film to have a presence during that window.
According to Britain's Roger Michell, though, being at the festival does not automatically guarantee a positive outcome.
'Perfect storm'
"When you go to a festival like Toronto, you're impressed by what a huge world your film is entering into," says the Notting Hill director, who will be in town to promote his Paris-set drama Le Week-end.
"You're an atom, a speck, an ignorable figment, and it's very hard to make your presence felt."
"It's kind of a behemoth," agrees Wendy Mitchell, editor of industry paper Screen International. "It's a perfect storm of a film festival.
"If there's a drawback to Toronto, it's that the programme's too big. Nobody can get a handle on it all: no publication, no critic."
"The complaint now, is that there's so many films to see in Toronto," says Sue Bruce-Smith. "It creates a problem in terms of how you get films to pop out and be distinctive.
"That's the challenge Toronto faces - making sure it allows visibility for all its films. The more films they take, the more difficult that challenge becomes."
Statements like that might well strike fear in the heart of a reporter who is preparing to attend the event for the very first time.
What advice would a seasoned attendee offer to an inexperienced newcomer like myself?
"It's colder than you think, so bring a jumper," says Hiddleston. "Leave your evenings free for parties and receptions," counsels Mitchell.
Veteran film critic Nick Roddick, meanwhile, says it is best to "get to screenings 45 minutes early, or you won't get in."
"Your experience will be so different from mine," sighs Michell. "I'm going for one night, I'm going to two screenings of my film and I won't be able to see any others because I'll be locked away doing interviews.
"You, on the other hand, will see lots of fabulous and interesting films, meet some fascinating people and get to enjoy being in Toronto as well.
"You're the lucky one!"
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For the first time, India's transgender people will be able to choose their gender as "other" on ballot forms following on from an Election Commission order of November 2009. BBC Monitoring's Vikas Pandey meets the community in Allahabad city to ask them about their hopes from the ongoing general election and the next government.
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The stars shine brightly as I navigate a narrow, dimly-lit lane to meet Rani.
She welcomes me into her modest home in an isolated part of the dusty city of Allahabad in the plains of northern India.
A group of her friends join us, keen to have their say on the summer's most-discussed topic - general elections.
Rani and her friends are members of the transgender community who are voting in the election for the first time as the third gender - so far, they had to register as either male or female with the Election Commission.
"What does this change mean for the transgender community in India?" I ask Rani and her friends.
"It's a good initiative because we don't want to be identified as male or female, but I am not confident that this will change our image in the collective conscience of this country," she says.
Adds Babli: "The Election Commission has given us the most important aspect of our life - freedom."
'Vote with pride'
In India, a common term used to describe transgender people, transsexuals, cross-dressers, eunuchs and transvestites is hijra. They are feared and reviled in many parts of the country and often live on the fringes of society.
Babli says that she will vote with pride in this election with her new voter ID card and urges other hijras to do the same.
She says her hope is that people will stop reacting negatively to the word hijra and start treating them as the "third sex".
Recently, India's Supreme Court recognised transgender people as a third gender in a landmark ruling and ordered the government to provide them with quotas in jobs and education in line with other minorities, as well as key amenities.
According to one estimate, there are nearly two million transgender people in the country and most of them are hoping that the next government will take the Election Commission and the Supreme Court's initiatives forward.
I tell Rani and her friends that the transgender people are celebrating the new initiatives in cities like Delhi and Mumbai.
Reena, one of the friends, says life in the big cities is relatively better. "Our problems in smaller towns and villages are very different from those of the transgender people living in big cities."
Reena adds that she is not against the idea of voting but does not feel confident that political parties will ever think about their problems.
"How are your problems different from those living in big cities?" I ask.
"People in Delhi and Mumbai are aware of the problems transgender people go through and are somewhat sensitive also," says Rani.
'We want recognition'
She adds that people in villages and small towns just know hijras as a community that dances during wedding ceremonies to earn money and often gets involved in prostitution.
"We too are human beings and a part of this society and we just want recognition and a normal life. I hope politicians will look at us as potential voters and make specific policies for us.
"Now even the Supreme Court has granted us recognition," she says.
Adds Tina, another transgender, that her hope is that her community will start getting basic human rights from the society.
"We are not even allowed to cremate our people in the day time. We always have to wait for the night to bid a final farewell to our friends," she says.
Reena remembers an incident when she went to a police station to complain about repeated harassments by a group of boys.
"I was thrown out of the police station. The cops behaved as if we don't have feelings and others have rights to harass us," she says.
I ask them if they will all vote? The group of eight collectively responds that they will vote in the hope that politicians may look into their problems.
I walk over to the nearby lane, that is barely getting some light from a distant street lamp, to meet another group of transgender people - Hasina, Kali, Bobby and Priyanka.
Bobby says she is not keen on voting. "That (voting) is just a nice thing to say in big cities. Do you have any idea how tough it is for us to make a living in villages?" she asks.
Priyanka, however, thinks that transgender people need to vote because issues like price rise and inflation hit them too.
She says a small thing like going to school was not possible for her because people told her that "transgender people are only meant to dance and not get educated". She wants the next government to plan special school for transgender children.
Hasina hopes the new government will make some policies for her community. "Just like other old people, many of us are not able to work after the age of 60. I want the government to make provision for a special pension for elderly transgender people," she says.
The group members say they have never been visited by any politician.
"Just look at the condition in which we live. Please tell ministers about us when you meet them," says Bobby.
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What's your favourite time of day? Have you ever worn odd socks? Why are you dressed as the devil?
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By Mark SavageBBC Music reporter
Pop magazines took a very different approach to interviews in the 1980s and, as the decade's biggest girl band, Bananarama found themselves fielding all of the above questions and more.
Smash Hits, Look-In and Number 1 devoted dozens of pages to the trio, many of which dwelt on the fact they lived together on the 11th floor of a block of flats in Holborn.
"It always looked better in the photos than it did in real life," laughs Keren Woodward, now 56 and living in more comfortable circumstances in Cornwall.
"It was a dive," recalls her bandmate and childhood friend Sara Dallin.
"You're not house-proud when you're young. But now I'd be like, 'Take your shoes off!'"
Still, those irreverent, Python-esque profiles were often more revealing than the now-standard "tell me about your co-writers" pop interview.
So, to celebrate the reunion of Bananarama's original line-up - and their first ever tour - we scoured the back issues and put a bunch [get it? - puns ed] of old questions to Sara, Keren and Siobhan to see how their answers have changed.
"Are these Neil Tennant's questions?" asks Sara before we start.
"He always reminds us he interviewed us once, but I don't remember it."
When you were 12, what did you want to be? (Smash Hits, 1983)
Keren: A lot of my family were teachers, so that's what I always thought I'd end up being. I think I'd have been quite strict - strict but fair - and, I like to think, hugely engaging.
Siobhan: I think I wanted to be [60s pop star] Melanie.
Back in 1983, Siobhan said she would like to be an "air hostess", while Keren and Sara both talked about becoming "David Essex's wife".
Sara: Oh God, I'm sure I never would have said that. Aged 12? Not at 12.
Keren [to Siobhan]: Oh yes, you went for a job as an air hostess. We took your picture, standing on a pouffe.
Sara: In your mother's skirt, trying to look elegant.
If you were an animal, what animal would you be?
Sara: Did I say, 'Dolphin'? No? For God's sake. Dog? Lion? Pheasant?
Siobhan: I was going to say elephant because I love them so, but they get butchered, don't they?
Keren: I would have said dog.
The original answers were actually dog (Siobhan), tiger (Sara) and horse (Keren).
Sara: But you hate horses.
Keren: I didn't know that at the time! I hadn't been thrown off one yet.
Did you enjoy being pregnant? (Number 1, 1987)
Keren: I absolutely loathed it.
Siobhan: I loved it. Whatever hormones kicked in, I got really happy.
Keren: I just felt very young and unprepared. I didn't know anyone who'd been pregnant, and I didn't know anyone who'd had a baby. Because everyone around me didn't really get it, I just kept on as though nothing was happening, even though I was slightly scared and throwing up everywhere. Sara would say, 'For God's sake, you're only pregnant, come out.'
Speaking in 1987, Keren said the only benefit of pregnancy was being sober, which had meant "I was handy for a lift now and then". She recently revealed that having children had stopped Bananarama's original line-up going on tour.
Keren: We were so desperate to get on stage. And, in a way, maybe it was good we didn't, because we didn't have the right people around us. We were just doing it ourselves.
Sara: If you look at the early performances, we look incredibly shy. We'd come straight from school, and then we were on Top of the Pops. We had absolutely no clue at all.
Siobhan: I think that was all part of the charm.
Sara: Even when we went on tour in [19]89 [with Siobhan's replacement, Jacquie O'Sullivan], I couldn't say we were hugely confident about what we were doing.
Keren: I mean, the only experience we had of being on stage was getting up, putting on a cassette and singing over the top.
Sara: But it's like any job. If you work in a bank or an office, you'd be shy when you arrived, and then you'd learn and then you'd be fine. It's just taken us 30 years.
Sara, did you enjoy covering naked men with your bat wings? (Smash Hits, 1986)
Sara: That's about the Venus video. The costume was so uncomfortable. It was a really tight corset with two poles running down the side of my arms, and a black wig. It was not an erotic experience, I'm afraid.
Siobhan: That was the first time we really went for an extravaganza in the costume department; obviously triggered by the lyrics of the song. And I think that's where we discovered our enjoyment of camp.
The video accompanied Venus, the first song the band produced with Mike Stock, Matt Aitken, and Pete Waterman's "hit factory", which also churned out hits for Kylie, Jason and Sinitta.
Keren: When it got really pop and quite camp, that was when Siobhan started to get disillusioned. But for me, personally, it just felt like I'd come alive. I enjoyed that period so much because it was just out-and-out pop. I'd just given up trying to explain we weren't dimwits and that we were serious artists. So it was just like letting go, and I embraced the whole pop thing and I absolutely loved it.
Siobhan: Making [the album] Wow! with Waterman, Stock and Aitken, they had a very much production-line approach. I felt there wasn't much room for musical experimentation with them, because they had their sound, and that was frustrating for me.
Sara: We always wrote with them. They would have preferred to write everything, but we wouldn't let them.
Siobhan: But I have to say, in hindsight, Wow! is the album that hangs together the best.
When did you first realise you were famous? (Smash Hits, 1983)
Keren: In Los Angeles, when Mike Tyson sang Cruel Summer.
Sara: We were walking back from breakfast to our hotel, where he was also staying. He was sitting in a limo, and he saw us and started singing Cruel Summer. We were just gobsmacked.
Keren: And he was world champ at the time. He was just the last person on Earth you'd expect to sing a Bananarama song. And you think, well, your reach must have got quite far with that sort of thing.
Siobhan's original answer was that she didn't feel famous, "apart from when you're recognised on buses".
Siobhan: I remember our first trip to Santa Monica, this girl got really excited when she saw us, and she came running up to me and shouted, 'Oh my God, aren't you the girl from Dexy's Midnight Runners?' And I was like, 'No, that's my sister.' [Maire Fahey starred in the video for Dexy's hit single Come On Eileen].
Don't you get on each other's nerves a lot? (Number 1, 1986)
Keren: Now? No.
Siobhan: It's been hilarious. We haven't stopped laughing.
Keren: It's back to the good old days before they turned… stale.
Sara: Stale - that's a much better word than sour.
In 1986, Siobhan said: "It's very hard working together and being mates sometimes, but no matter how hard it gets, you sort of understand each other." She quit the band two years later, and the friends didn't speak for almost a decade.
Will Bananarama ever make a feature film? (Number 1, 1984)
Sara: Obviously not.
Siobhan: I'm writing a script at the moment, in between Bananarama things. It's a historical epic, set in Elizabethan times. But I don't want to give too much away.
Keren fielded this question in 1984, saying: "If we did, it would have to be one of those cheap musicals."
Keren: We always had plans, on and off. We were approached to do the story of Bananarama as a film.
Sara: The trouble with us was we never had management that consolidated our ideas, so it never got put together. I mean, the Spice Girls made a film, which was kind of what ours was going to be like, but we never got it together.
Siobhan: It would be a TV series now. Things have swung that way.
Keren: We could play the mums.
Is there life on other planets? (Smash Hits, 1986)
Siobhan: Well, for sure. There's got to be.
Sara: We haven't discovered any, though. You'd think we would have discovered something by now. All we hear about is water here and gas there.
Maybe this is because, as Siobhan said in 1986, we'd be unable to see alien life forms "because they're bound to have a totally different chemical make-up".
Siobhan: Oh yeah, they're right here in this room but on a different frequency.
Keren: And they are really excited about the Bananarama reunion. They are desperate for it.
What's your favourite single you've released so far?
Sara: Cruel Summer, just because that was such an odd little pop song. It was our first hit in the States, which was unbelievably exciting.
Siobhan: I think we all have that as a favourite, because it just sounds like nothing before or afterwards, really.
Sara's answer remains the same, but in 1986 Keren plumped for the band's debut single, Aie-A-Mwana, while Siobhan preferred Really Saying Something for its "shrieky vocals".
Sara: We're going to set aside some time this year to get together and do some [new music] for the tour.
Keren: It would be a shame to not have something new. Will it live up to the past? Well if it doesn't, we won't release it.
Keren, how often do you wash your hair? (Number 1, 1984)
Sara: Every day. Every day, she washes her hair.
Keren: I've got greasy hair, what can I say? I never skip more than one day.
In 1984, Keren claimed the figure was "twice a week", prompting general disbelief from her friends.
While walking along a deserted beach, you spy a couple making love. Do you stay and watch? (Smash Hits, 1986)
Siobhan: Ew.
Sara: I'd call the police.
Keren: I'd call all my friends over. I wouldn't watch on my own. Take some photos.
Keren originally replied she'd "put some mirrored shades on" and watch while pretending to look the other way.
Sara: That's a bit raunchy.
Siobhan: They were odd questions in those days.
What's next for Bananarama? (Look-In, October 1987)
Keren: I'm looking forward to doing the vocal arrangements for the tour. That's my favourite bit. I'm hoping we can sing three-part harmonies on some of the songs, because we always used to sing in unison. It would be nice to do it in a more grown-up way.
Siobhan: The staging is all in the pipeline, but it'll reflect our personality and "unique style" [everyone laughs].
Keren: I don't want to be standing there with lasers going off. Our show will be about the camaraderie and the fun.
Speaking on the phone in 1987, Siobhan's response to this question was simply: "I'm going to get out of this bath. The water's gone horribly cold."
The classic Bananarama line-up tours the UK for the first time this November. Tickets are on sale now.
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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When I asked the Chinese finance minister, Shi Yaobin, for his reaction to the allegation made by Donald Trump during the presidential campaign that China was "raping" America with its cheap exports I wasn't, if I'm honest, expecting a response.
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Kamal AhmedEconomics editor@bbckamalon Twitter
Mr Shi was in Britain last month to talk about trade with Britain, not to respond to the election of a new US president who has said that China is guilty of currency manipulation - deliberately devaluing the renminbi to undercut global export prices.
Chinese officials had made it clear that Mr Shi would only be speaking about Anglo-Sino relations.
So, when he did answer, preceded by a very visible wince, it sent a clear message that China not only took the matter seriously but was willing to speak about it publicly.
China doesn't say anything without a good deal of calculation.
"I want to say that the US is the world's largest economy and China is the second largest economy, there are immense economic exchanges and co-operation between the two countries," he told me.
"And these kinds of economic cooperation and exchanges have yielded tangible benefits to the countries and people of both China and the United States.
"I think that these benefits should be recognised by the president-elect and the peoples of the two countries."
President-elect Trump, Mr Shi went on, might change his tune now he was about to enter the White House.
No such luck, I'm afraid.
Last night, Mr Trump announced that the economist and China hawk, Peter Navarro, would lead his new National Trade Council.
Here's Mr Navarro on trade with China:
"The defining moment in American economic history is when Bill Clinton lobbied to get China into the World Trade Organisation. It was the worst political and economic mistake in American history in the last 100 years," he told PBS Newshour in August.
"From 1947 to 2001, the American economy grew annually at a rate of 3.5%.
"After China got into the World Trade Organisation, got access to our markets and flooded our markets with its illegally subsidised exports, we grew at a rate of 1.8% from 2002 to 2015.
"That's almost cut in half."
Some might point out the small issue of the financial crisis and the general collapse in Western economies in 2008, but Mr Navarro is making a broader point which speaks to a theme dominating present economic and political thinking.
'Play by the rules'
Globalisation and free trade have increased general wealth - and lifted millions of people out of poverty across emerging markets - but it has led to a perception that, in developed economies, groups of people whose jobs were particularly associated with traditional manufacturing have lost out.
Mr Navarro insists he is not against free trade and the advantages it brings - denying the "mercantilist" tag that America is simply seeking to set up protectionist barriers.
He claims agreement with the ultimate advocate of free trade economics, the 19th Century economist David Ricardo, who analysed the advantages of cutting tariffs and said doing so was an economic good.
Protectionism, he argued, led to lower growth.
Mr Navarro says the Ricardian model depends on freely floating exchange rates and participants in free trade deals "playing by the rules".
China still limits the flexibility of the renminbi on international markets.
And is accused of "short-cutting" WTO rules.
"Protectionism is what happened leading into the Great Depression with things like the Smoot-Hawley Tariffs - the design was just to put these big walls up on your markets and then try to basically take unfair advantage," Mr Navarro said in the same PBS interview.
He backs what are called "countervailing tariffs" - barriers imposed to stop unfair trading practices that Mr Navarro accuses China of following.
Free trade, he insists, is still the end goal.
And here he lines up with Mr Trump's other trade adviser, Dan DiMicco, who told me before the Presidential election that Britain would be at the "front of the queue" when it came to a free trade deal.
Trade war
Now, Mr Navarro has his fair share of critics.
Firstly, the critics say, if China is the problem why has Mr Trump also said he wants to pull out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a free trade deal between America, Canada, Japan, Vietnam and Singapore (among others) which very deliberately does not include China?
And secondly, cheap imports from China may not have been good for some traditional steel producers for example but they have been very good for hard pressed US consumers who have enjoyed lower prices in the shops.
They have also, maybe counter-intuitively, been good for US businesses which have had to respond to competition from overseas by diversifying into new technologies and services, leading to higher levels of wealth creation.
For a particularly sharp take down of Mr Navarro's position, it's worth reading Tim Worstall in Forbes.
Mr Worstall says that international trade is by definition - as an agreement entered into voluntarily - beneficial to both parties and that the argument that America has lost its manufacturing base is "simply wrong".
Jobs have changed, not disappeared.
What is becoming clear is that the new man headed for the White House is serious about taking on China.
A significant trade war between the world's two economic super powers could well be approaching.
Which could affect global growth for all of us.
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